


Marlena, take me home [Translation from Italian]

by Gweiddi_at_Ecate, ueberdemnebelmeer



Category: I Medici | Medici: Masters of Florence (TV), I Medici | Medici: The Magnificent (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bar Room Brawl, Car Accidents, Don't copy to another site, F/M, Hospitalization, Infidelity, M/M, Minor Character Death, Multi, Polyamory, References to Depression, Sibling Incest, Translation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-20
Updated: 2020-02-12
Packaged: 2020-07-08 04:59:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 36,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19863880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gweiddi_at_Ecate/pseuds/Gweiddi_at_Ecate, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ueberdemnebelmeer/pseuds/ueberdemnebelmeer
Summary: In which Francesco, Lorenzo and Giuliano put the pieces of a life back together and build the foundations for a new one. All around them stand the people they're touching with their eyes and their fingertips.A series of self-contained, though interlinked, episodes set in modern-day Florence.(Translation of the "Marlena portami a casa" series written byEcate (Gweiddi_at_Ecate))





	1. Marlena, come back home (it’s cold in here, I’m afraid I’ll fade away)

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [Quindi Marlena torna a casa (che il freddo qua si fa sentire, che ho paura di sparire)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16687834) by [Gweiddi_at_Ecate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gweiddi_at_Ecate/pseuds/Gweiddi_at_Ecate). 
  * A translation of [Marlena se adesso ti perdo (ti sento lontana, ti nasconderò dentro frasi che non sentirai)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16752277) by [Gweiddi_at_Ecate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gweiddi_at_Ecate/pseuds/Gweiddi_at_Ecate). 
  * A translation of [(e capirai che forse) Gli angeli son tutte rondini](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16882974) by [Gweiddi_at_Ecate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gweiddi_at_Ecate/pseuds/Gweiddi_at_Ecate). 
  * A translation of [La dolce Marlena (non c'è taglio, non c'è cicatrice)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17113976) by [Gweiddi_at_Ecate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gweiddi_at_Ecate/pseuds/Gweiddi_at_Ecate). 
  * A translation of [Marlena vinci la sera (spogliati nera, mostra la bellezza a questo popolo)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18029993) by [Gweiddi_at_Ecate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gweiddi_at_Ecate/pseuds/Gweiddi_at_Ecate). 
  * A translation of [A New York mancano le stelle (a New York non ci sono io)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18144542) by [Gweiddi_at_Ecate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gweiddi_at_Ecate/pseuds/Gweiddi_at_Ecate). 



> When I stumbled upon this series and devoured its first installments, my first thought was, "Ohhh, this is _good_ ", so good that that thought was followed by, "More people need to appreciate it." And here I am, doing the Lord's work ( ~~yeah, I think highly of myself, don't I~~ ).  
>   
>  **Disclaimer: _I'm no translator, this was made out of sheer and unadulterated appreciation of the piece_**. Beta-ed by the lovely author [[Gweiddi_at_Ecate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gweiddi_at_Ecate/pseuds)], any typos or mistakes left are mine.  
>   
>  **This thing is gay, it's queer and it's a lot of other things that may not be all sugar and spice and everything nice. So, dead dove don't eat and all that stuff.**  
>   
>  I will update tags and warnings as I go (and I'll warn about noteworthy ones in the chapter notes). Unfortunately, the updating schedule is non-existent: you might find a further chapter whenever there's an opening in my calendar ( ~~is this me advertising the Subscribe button? Maybe, HA~~ ) - but, whatever happens, rest assured I will finish translating it.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Before you I was just a madman, now let me tell you_   
>  _I’ve got a worn out vest and I carried cuts on my wrists_   
>  _Today I feel blessed and I can’t find anything more to say_   
>  _This city will look out when it sees us coming._   
>  _I was wavering between being the victim and being the judge_   
>  _It was a thrill that brings light to the darkness_   
>  _and frees you from these glimmering, shiny chains_   
>  _and from the doubt as to whether they were deaths or rebirths_   
>    
>  **In which you can't recognise the man under the helmet and Francesco can't write a letter.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title and excerpt in the summary from [_Torna A Casa_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZjnfWx0cvw) by Måneskin  
>   
> CHAPTER DETAILS  
>  **rating:** M  
>  **pairings:** Giuliano/Lorenzo/Francesco  
>  **tags:** Car Accidents, Hospitalization, Infidelity, Minor Character Death

  
  
  


Moodboard crossposted from [Tumblr](https://ueberdemnebelmeer.tumblr.com/post/186426888963/)

* * *

The cigarette is heavy between his fingers and his eyes sting. The icy air comes in through the window he forgot to shut, and a gust colder than the others makes him shiver inside his jumper.

Francesco runs a hand over his face and sighs, because he doesn’t know what else he can do. 

He pulls a drag of his cigarette and for a moment he wishes it were something stronger than tobacco, but he left joints behind fifteen years ago, inside the classrooms of his high school and together with the girlfriend he thought he’d marry, and with the bottles of rum he used to steal from his uncle’s cellar. 

Now he’s facing a packet of crumpled Marlboros and an empty glass with droplets of red wine still washing its bottom, and his head is shouting so loudly that even the stereo has fallen silent, because the memory of the metal crashing and the smell of burnt tyres is stronger than anything else. 

He’s facing a sheet of paper, and his hand shakes. He’s been staring at it for three days straight now and he keeps telling himself that filling it shouldn’t be so hard, not when the words and the cries have been pressing against his throat since the moment he had woken up and his brother had told him that Giuliano had been rushed to another hospital. 

He has tried ringing Lorenzo – it’s ludicrous that after all these years he still knows his phone number by heart – but any time he was about to start the call, his courage failed him and so here he is, with a smoking cigarette and the ash falling onto his fingers, and Francesco doesn’t even care about the burn. On the contrary, he welcomes it: the small drop of thankful pain on his skin is the only thing keeping his brain still trapped and working inside his skull. 

The only pen he found at home is the red one – where have all the Montblancs gone, those with which he shows he’s someone who matters? – and the words on that exhausted sheet of paper look like an accusation written in Giuliano’s blood. A finger pointed at him, judge, jury and judgment. 

_I’m sorry. I want to die. I love him too. I love you._

Francesco re-reads those lines, pulls another drag, the smoke climbing up his nostrils and drilling into his brain, and he starts laughing. He laughs with his eyes shut, he laughs so much his stomach hurts, he laughs pulling his hair in his fist and with tears stinging his eyes, ready to flow, but Francesco is not one to cry, he’s one to swallow his emotions together with the right words and to leave them there to eat him up from the inside. 

He laughs because, in the end, it’s all true and it took Death caressing him on his face and telling him _“Not yet ”_ to figure it out. It took the tarmac which tore away half of his jacket and his uncle inside a coffin chosen by Guglielmo while Francesco was still under sedation, because Jacopo Pazzi had been the one driving the car which had run them over, ‘cause Jacopo’s head had blown off long ago and everybody knew, and that one was Giuliano Medici’s Ducati on the road and his uncle had no idea that the man riding with Giuliano was Francesco, not Lorenzo. Francesco shouldn’t even have been there. Truly, since when did his nephew care if a Medici took the road while drunk and risked his death on the way home? 

More or less since Francesco was eighteen and Giuliano fifteen, uncle, and the two of them and Novella lingered five minutes too long outside the school gates, teeth chattering because of the cold and trading one lighter between all three. 

Except, his uncle didn’t know that. He has never known, because if you are a Pazzi there are certain things you simply cannot do. 

His heart catches in his throat and that thought comes back to plant itself behind his eyes: _I want to die. If Giuliano doesn’t wake up, I want to die too_. 

Novella would slap him if she heard him, if she knew, but Novella has been living in Scotland for years now and so the only person who can slap Francesco is Francesco himself. 

He gives one last glance to his pen and the words he wrote and he realises that it’s not enough, that there are no lines, no letters nor ink which could put a lid on even an ounce of the guilt he feels because he had never taken his uncle seriously when he used to say that the Medicis should all die, because, all in all, Francesco had taken some sort of sadistic and masochistic pleasure in agreeing with Jacopo when he started with his invectives against them: Cosimo and Piero had nearly run the Pazzis to the ground, and, in their own way, Lorenzo and Giuliano had ruined Francesco forever with their eyes so blue and full of life, with first’s charismatic idealism the latter’s humane cynicism.

And God, Francesco had never managed to tear those eyes away from his head, and Novella had told him, she had tried to make him understand, and instead he had sent her back home screaming and punching his fists against the wall until his hands had bled, until even she had become afraid of staying close to him and so she had left to never come back. 

Francesco glares at his wretched excuse of a letter and crumples it in his hands with the same rage with which he’d squeeze his uncle’s throat were he still alive. He got off easy, dying on the impact. He is lucky that Giuliano’s still alive – in a coma, sure, but still _alive_ – and that Francesco survived too, otherwise even with his soul deep in hell he would have found him and asked him with his hands around his throat: _“Are you happy now that you’ve killed a Medici? Are you happy, uncle?”_

_Do you know that I fucked them both, uncle? Do you know that the first time you gave me the keys to your car I went out with Giuliano and had him o n the backseats? We used to be friends before he fucked the girl who had messed with my girlfriend._

_But you didn’t even know that Novella used to have troubles, because telling you things was like handing you a weapon, and sooner or later you would have shot somebody. You would have even shot me, had I stood in the way._

_Do you know that Lorenzo, Lorenzo who m you hoped to kill and instead I was the one under that helmet the other night, do you know he fucked me so hard I kept feeling him inside me even the day afterwards? We slept together for another month after he got with Clarice, but then he wanted to set things right and he stopped and I have never been able to withstand it._

Do you know that if you weren’t dead I’d kill you myself for trying to hurt Lorenzo and Giuliano. Do you know, do you know, do you know, do you know. You know, what do you know? You don’t know shit. You raised me, you taught me everything, and you never knew shit about me. 

Francesco hurls the crumpled paper to the floor. He lights another cigarette, grabs his jacket and leaves the house slamming the door, the windows still open and the damp, cold air wafting inside. A glimpse of smoke stays trapped behind him in an empty room.

⁂

Francesco hates hospitals, he’s spent too much time inside them when he was little, with his uncle’s hand pushing him inside his mother’s room first and his father’s later, both avidly gnawed by cancer as if it were something contagious instead of a twist of fate which tried to tell him even then that, beware Francesco, beware, the home you live in has poison in the air and the blood running through your veins is sick, rotten. 

The smell in the corridors is still the same of his memories, of latex gloves and people slowly dying between sheets that aren’t theirs; it fills his nostrils and goes down his throat like a vomit he must swallow to prevent anyone from seeing he’s not fine, to prevent anyone from realising there’s something inside his body that is broken.

He keeps his hands in his pockets and he twists the lighter between his fingers while he cautiously checks inside every room. Guglielmo was only able to tell him the ward: Lorenzo doesn’t want anyone with a Pazzi name anywhere near his brother and he and Bianca have fought to the point that she and Guglielmo have left home, and now Bianca commutes between Fiesole and the hospital and squeezes Giuliano’s listless hand only when Lorenzo is not there rather than being in the same room with him. 

At last, Francesco holds his neck out and sees Giuliano’s mother sitting at the foot of a bed. Lucrezia Tornabuoni’s face is aged and pale, worn, her usually perfectly coiffed hair left loose on her shoulders to provide further shelter from the worry and the blind terror that her son will never wake her up at four in the morning again, he won’t make the steps creak as he returns home from his umpteenth night out, he will never promise her that from tomorrow onwards he’d try and get his act together and be a bit more like Lorenzo, a little less like himself. 

Lucrezia lets her eyes wander for a moment and, catching Francesco’s, she startles. 

“Mum, what’s wrong?”

A warm voice, a worried one, calls her, and it chills Francesco to the bone because he’s not ready to meet that voice. Not like this, not now, not before Giuliano opens his eyes and tells everyone that Heaven doesn’t want him and that they sent him back down just to have some more peaceful years up there. 

Francesco had hoped that Bianca would be there. He had hoped that no one would be there, that he could come in and face Giuliano and apologise – for Jacopo, for surviving, for not choosing another road – and leave before anyone could notice. 

Lorenzo turns towards the door to check what could have upset his mother. Francesco has only a second but it’s enough to notice everything about him: his weary and tight face, his beard that hasn’t been shaved for four days, the first three buttons left open on his shirt and his cuffs unfastened and rolled up allowing a glimpse at his pale forearms. Then, fierce rage ignites Lorenzo’s eyes and twists his mouth. He stands up with such a leap that the chair tumbles to the floor. 

Francesco doesn’t move, torn in half by the instinct to back off, to hide from a family around which he’s always gravitated as an undesired, unlit satellite, and the instinct to stick his chest out and fight for a right which maybe isn’t even his, which has never been so. 

“What are you doing here?” Lorenzo snarls, and when he’s not given any reply, he throws himself at Francesco. 

Lucrezia tries to stop him. She stretches out her arms and begs, “Lorenzo! Lorenzo, no, let him go, stay here!” but Lorenzo is already out of the room and he shoves him against the wall with such violence that Francesco hits his head and it takes his breath away, and for a moment there are just the slate of pain sawing his skull and chest and the awareness that – if he doesn’t react soon – Lorenzo will end what Jacopo has inadvertently started with one homicidal swerve and Giuliano’s motorbike knocked off the road. 

Lorenzo jerks him by his clothes, wrath foaming from his mouth and eyes as Francesco has never seen before. But those mental transparencies he has still stored of Lorenzo are dated and distant, they go back to the time when Jacopo’s resentment was only a barking dog that couldn’t bite, to the years before the Medicis’ agreement with the Sforzas and before the wedding with Clarice and the birth of their son. 

Now, the person before him is a Lorenzo he doesn’t know anymore, and Francesco grabs both his wrists before Lorenzo can try and strangle him like Francesco would have already done if the person in a coma on that bed were Guglielmo. 

“I need to know how he is.”

“You only need to stay away from Giuliano!”

Francesco grits his teeth and shoves Lorenzo away. “I was the one there that night, not you!” he hisses at his face because, after all these years spent waging war against the Medicis, spitting poison at Lorenzo’s face has become a spinal reflex, a reaction he can’t control as one cannot control their own heartbeat or their hunger pangs. 

Lorenzo yells and flings himself at him. Francesco has barely the time to block his arms that the nurses rush to set them apart and throw them out of the ward amidst Lucrezia’s anguished cries, and every breath reminds him that he still has three broken ribs and it would be really hilarious if he had found the courage to get this far only to die for a lung punctured by his own stupidity. 

They’re both dragged outside even though Lorenzo has raised his hands in surrender as soon as they have ordered him to calm down, and now a mask of icy composedness has fallen over his face and it leaves Francesco with a parched mouth and a dry throat. 

Always polite, Lorenzo, always poised and respectful of rules and workers, he nods and makes for the door without a fuss. He’s nothing like Francesco, who shakes off a nurse with a shrug of his shoulders and hisses at another one to back off, that he can find the exit on his own. 

The doors close behind them and Francesco barely manages to open his mouth to breathe before Lorenzo’s clenched fist knocks him across his jaw, sending him back by two steps at least. 

“We were friends once! We were friends!”

Lorenzo shouts and the people outside the hospital stop to dart their scared eyes at them, all civilly scandalised by this crazy stranger’s yelling and concurrently voracious for a hatred that won’t preoccupy them for more than a minute. 

His face stings and throbs where Lorenzo has hit him, and Francesco brings a hand to his cheek only to persuade himself not to strike back, to remember that he’s not here to spark another fight. 

It would be easier to do it. It would be much easier, to skin his knuckles on Lorenzo’s teeth and forget he has come here to check on Giuliano instead of opening his mouth to speak, but he hears the ghost of Novella’s whispers in his ear telling him to be honest for once, to be brave with his heart and mind rather than with his anger and his fists. 

“Jacopo thought it was you that night. He thought it was you and Giuliano on his bike, and he aimed at us.”

Lorenzo blanches and his shoulders fall like concrete shattered by an earthquake.

“What?”

Francesco looks him in the eyes and every needle of bewilderment and incredulity in Lorenzo’s gaze is a thorn that Francesco plucks from his own wrists and which leaves rivulets of blood behind pouring on his soul. 

“I found Giuliano and he wasn’t… listen, he’s not well, you know that, right?”

Of course Lorenzo knows. Everybody knows that after Simonetta, Giuliano has not been the same. Rumours have reached even Francesco, sometimes in the form of hysterical and concerned phone calls from Bianca who’s still persisting on telling him they’re part of the same family, sometimes in the form of hearsay, _“D’you know what the Medici did? No, not the Magnificent, you kidding? I mean his brother, the youngest one.”_

And Francesco would like to pay no attention to those rumours, he has tried, but in the meantime they gnaw at his stomach like a particularly stubborn woodworm. And so when he saw Giuliano under that lamppost, swaying as he tried to start his motorbike, he couldn’t walk past him and turn a blind eye. “He wasn in no state to ride his bike. If he had run someone over he would’ve never forgiven himself and so I told him to get behind and that I’d be the one to drive. He gave me your helmet–” the one that Giuliano always carries around because Lorenzo has given up his own bike after his son’s birth, but he can’t give up the wheels and the deafening wind as the road runs under you; so, right up to two weeks ago, you could still see them riding in two around the Florentine countryside on Giuliano’s bike any time Clarice went back to Rome to visit her parents– “and Jacopo recognised the motorbike and thought it was you two.”

Lorenzo is so pale that for a moment Francesco is afraid he’ll collapse, and so he takes one step forward to be ready to hold him up. 

Lorenzo has never been able to hide his emotions – after all, he’s never had to, right? – he wears them on his face painted with clear and vibrant colours as a forever-visible portrait of his soul, and now the shock and the guilt stain his cheeks with grey and mauve, such ill colours that should never touch him. 

“I should’ve been the one there,” Lorenzo murmurs running a hand through his hair and Francesco shakes his head because, no, because Francesco has always been better than him at handling a motorbike, and if Lorenzo had been the one in his place, he would’ve veered to suffer most of the impact himself and spare Giuliano, but there really wouldn’t have been a way to save themselves from Jacopo’s homicidal folly, and now Bianca would be weeping for the death of two brothers instead of losing her sleep over only one of them. Lorenzo has a wife and a little boy for whom the sun rises and sets on his smile, he can’t afford himself to lie motionless in a coffin. 

“You should thank God that was not the case.”

“Your uncle…”

“He did it on purpose.”

“Did he really try to kill him?”

Francesco doesn’t know what to say, if he should reiterate that yes, he did, that the memory of the car suddenly swerving and sending them to crash off-road is seared behind his eyelids and he re-lives it every time he closes his eyes; or if he should try and ask himself whether there’s a different explanation to the disaster that broke his ribs or almost killed Giuliano. However, he’s currently still too busy thanking the God he’s not acquainted with for taking his uncle in Giuliano’s place, so he simply shrugs his shoulders with a tired grimace and says nothing. 

Lorenzo lets out one bereft sob and his whole body trembles as tears start streaming from his eyes. He closes his eyelids, lost as he realises at that moment that Giuliano could have really died, that it came this close to his brother simply not existing anymore.

“Lorenzo…” Francesco comes closer with his hand stretched forward, he rests it carefully on Lorenzo’s arm and he watches him cry. 

“He’s my brother,” Lorenzo says to him, and this would already be enough of an apology, but Lorenzo doesn’t try to hide behind his love, behind his affection, and he throws his arms around Francesco’s neck, hands on his head as if he were afraid Francesco could try to wiggle out of it. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I thought that– I don’t know. I don’t know, I saw him coming on that gurney and I didn’t–”

Francesco nods even though Lorenzo can’t see him and – slowly, cautiously, because Lorenzo is his personal black beast and touching him frightens Francesco, it messes with his head, and there’s a chain around his ribcage and it binds him and it hurts – he hugs him back. He shields his back with his arms and he lowers his face, his cheek rubs against Lorenzo’s and Francesco can feel it, how Lorenzo is shivering from the cold, how the freezing winter air keeps settling on his body while he is wearing only his unbuttoned shirt.

Lorenzo smells of soap and expensive things, of pale and smooth skin where Francesco once used to sink his teeth and leave his marks where they would be hard to conceal. Lorenzo was always careful, instead, he took him violently and cut his breath but never left any visible proof of his passage. 

As soon as he stood up and redressed himself, it was as if nothing had ever happened. 

“It’s alright. I know, I understand,” Francesco soothes him. He keeps on repeating it until Lorenzo’s sobs ease, and who knows for how long he had needed this, to crumble and weep into a safe embrace – because Francesco is so, isn’t he? Safe. For Lorenzo, for Giuliano, a little bit for everyone. He’s never meant to do any harm, and then it happened anyway – and to give in to panic and fear instead of keeping his head high for the rest of the family. 

Lorenzo’s breathing is muffled and uneven and his hand cedes and slips on Francesco’s shoulder. His numb fingers track his shoulder blade with their pads, moving delicately yet persistently upon the spot where the tattoo inks his skin, as if he were trying to retrace its outline over the clothes, like he used to do when they were naked on a bed and Lorenzo kissed and caressed his pieces of a puzzle that doesn’t line up. 

_“What does it mean?”_

_“It’s the things that can’t work out in my life.”_

_“As in?”_

_“Forget it, Lorenzo.”_

Francesco breathes in through gritted teeth. Remembering those moments still hurts, but at least now, with Lorenzo murmuring apologies in his ear and with that inch he has over Francesco, it’s not fierce rage that seethes down his throat, but it’s rather a punch to the stomach and the taste of nostalgia sticking to the roof of his mouth. 

And with Lorenzo’s forehead against his, falling back into old habits is so easy, almost too easy. Francesco doesn’t even think about it: his mouth falls on Lorenzo’s driven by blind instinct alone, it’s just body memory and habit, and the taste of Lorenzo’s lips hasn’t changed, his tongue is still hot and it kindles a fire in his groin. Even his short breath is the same as Lorenzo clings to him and pushes Francesco against the wall, but he’s gentle this time: this time Lorenzo doesn’t want to hurt him and he remembers that Francesco was there too, scraping the asphalt that night with Giuliano, and it’s God’s miracle that his bones aren’t all broken. 

Maybe there is a bit of divine virtue in the world, maybe someone or something came down from the Heavens to grab Francesco by his neck on the night of the accident in order to allow him to be in Lorenzo’s arms right now, with the truth exposed almost in its entirety and his chest that, after all, isn’t hurting that much any longer. 

⁂

Two days later, Lorenzo and Francesco are both in the hospital room arguing whether they should put on that heinous kind of music Giuliano always listens to and check if it is of any use, and Francesco suggests they’d rather put on those indie songs Lorenzo was obsessed with back in his gymnasium days: Giuliano would wake up just to tell him to go to hell and go listen to his teenage crimes elsewhere. 

Lorenzo’s lips curve into something very similar to a smile as he admits that it’s not a bad idea, and in the meanwhile he peeps at his phone and informs Francesco that Clarice has reached the airport but Novella’s flight is late because of some disturbances over the Alps. 

Because, in the end, Francesco has called Novella, and she’s just said _“I’m coming,”_ and boarded the first plane from Edinburgh to come back home, back to him and Giuliano. She might not even slap him too hard when she’ll see his still-swollen cheekbone after Lorenzo’s punch, or, far more likely, she’ll just show him enough mercy to slap him on the other cheek. 

They’re chortling softly, an alien and unsure sound that is still testing the waters to understand if there actually is room for a laugh between them, when suddenly the machines monitoring Giuliano’s vitals change their rhythm and both their gazes dart to him. At the first quiver behind his eyelids, Lorenzo is already there to grab his hand, calling his name, and Francesco dashes out of the room to call for the doctor. 

Once he’s free of the oxygen mask, GIuliano’s first hoarse words are all for Lorenzo, for the brother who – Giuliano must surely know, even if it’s just a gut feeling, he must know – has stayed by his side for all this time. And yet, as soon as the doctors and the nurses are done jotting down, quantifying and measuring, his eyes lift and take Francesco in, and the relief on Giuliano’s face is so apparent it almost hurts to see it. 

“Hey. You’re here,” he murmurs with such a feeble and raspy voice that it’s a struggle to discern his words. 

Francesco steps forward, his fists clenched. He jabs his nails into his palms to stop his emotions from overtaking him. 

“Yes, I’m here.”

“Is that eye from the accident?”

Francesco’s mouth twitches involuntary into something that might even resemble a smile: Giuliano knows a punch when he sees one, he has thrown and received too many of them to pretend he doesn’t know the one on Francesco’s face is not a present from the crash which nearly killed him. 

“No, I have to thank your brother for that.”

“Ah. Are you two okay now?” Giuliano asks, and the air catches in Francesco’s throat with a choking sound. 

“Francesco?”

He lifts his hand over his eyes and for a moment everything is dark and hot, and something is pushing behind his eyelids to spill out. He starts laughing, he throws away all the fear and all the anxiety from the top of his lungs, and the tears flow freely from his eyes as they have not done in years and years. 

“Yes. Yes, Giuliano, we’re okay now.”

Now, Francesco is okay and maybe, maybe now, maybe now he will even stop feeling cold inside and being so scared of drowning. 

Giuliano coughs and groans, “Come here, I can’t sit up.”

Francesco complies and moves closer and Giuliano grabs him by the wrist with a strength you wouldn’t expect from someone who’s just woken up from a coma. Or it may just be that Francesco feels as weak as a toddler at that moment and he has no possibility to offer any resistance. 

Giuliano brings him down and Francesco finds himself with his face buried in blonde hair and with Giuliano’s arms around his shoulders.

“We’ve missed you, asshole. Welcome back.”

And Francesco is clueless as to why he’s spent years without knowing that Lorenzo and Giuliano’s arms are the one home he had to come back to. Now, though, he’s managed to do it, and maybe that’s the only thing which matters.

The cold will go away with time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll bake you virtual cakes if you reblog the [promo on Tumblr](https://ueberdemnebelmeer.tumblr.com/post/186426888963/)! :)


	2. Marlena, if I lose you now (I feel you’re far from me, I’ll hide you inside the lines you won’t hear)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _But now let me believe this is all real_   
>  _'Cause I feel the anxiety rising, I drink the bitter tears_   
>  _Please let me lose myself in the sea water_   
>  _'Cause the faraway words, I swear, I want to scream them at you_   
>  _Because I feel that you're far, far from me_   
>    
>  **In which Francesco and Giuliano run from Florence and they take shelter in a house built by ghosts.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title and excerpt in the summary from [_Le Parole Lontane_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4F-9oqbAwY) by Måneskin  
>   
> CHAPTER DETAILS  
>  **rating:** M  
>  **pairings:** Giuliano/Francesco; Giuliano/Lorenzo/Francesco; (references to: Giuliano/Simonetta; Francesco/Novella)  
>  **tags:** References to Depression, References to Characters' Death

It’s been six months since the night of the accident and it’s summer now. Clarice is pregnant again, Lorenzo is over the moon and Francesco and Giuliano need a change of scenery for a few days at least. 

Giuliano’s motorbike was beyond repair and Lorenzo went nuts when his brother bought a new one without batting an eye – without asking for his permission – but Giuliano is just like that: he doesn’t let anything or anyone tread on him, not even mortality. Not his own, if nothing else: that of others is a different story, but Francesco is gracious enough not to point that out. Not yet, at least. There will be time. It has taken them long enough already to understand that maybe Giuliano has never been wholly well, that all his cynicism and his brazen laughter are his means to conceal something ranker, something that Francesco could have recognised from the beginning if only he had been less afraid of facing the mirror when he still sat at his school desk. 

However, weighing the ifs and buts from their past when it’s now impossible to fix them is a slow exercise in the art of suicide, and Francesco has finally come to understand this, hence why a quick look at Giuliano’s wild eyes is enough for him to suggest him to pack a bag and leave together for the country home in Arezzo. It won’t even be for many days, just enough to figure out how to re-learn how to breathe through their noses and their teeth again. 

Francesco smiles with a joy that’s close to twisted for taking Giuliano exactly to the estate among the hills which once belonged to Jacopo. It seems the most fitting fuck you in history to him, to use that isolated spot of which his uncle was so proud, to take a break from everything in the company of the person Jacopo hasn’t managed to kill.

It takes even too little time to arrive, barely one hour and a half with the tarmac flowing fast, with the smell of petrol and exhaust fumes and the August sun baking his skin underneath his jacket. Francesco is the one riding in the front, paving the way and showing his index and middle finger in salute to the other bikers he crosses along way – Giuliano doesn’t, he doesn’t do that because it’s a fundamental law of existence that Ducati bikers are a foreign breed, much like the Earth’s orbit or water’s essentiality to life – and they too are riding under their helmets like Francesco and Giuliano, high on stealing miles and wearing their tyres out till the air is still hot, because August will always bend the knee to September too soon, reclaiming their free time with office hours and the buttoned collars of starched shirts. 

And yet, Francesco envies those strangers because, despite him not knowing anything about them, he feels like gifting them with fleeting images of a life much simpler than his, a life where they maybe they won’t have their hearts ripped in too many pieces for them to make any sense or homes filled with more pictures of faded deads than of people living and laughing. 

When they reach the gates to the estate, pebbles fly up from the cobblestones like a cloud of dry-fired bullets, and Francesco is quite surprised to see the country home still standing at the end of the driveway, intact and huge as it was in his memories. 

He hasn’t come back since he was a young boy, since the year in which aunt Maddalena had brought Guglielmo and him there for the last time before she died, before Jacopo left the keys to the same trusted woman whom Francesco had called three days ago, and then he returned there always and solely alone, searching for his wife’s ghost under the swing in the backyard. 

Under the shade of the olive trees and the flowerbeds running all alongside the lawn, and inside the rooms where everything appears to have remained unmoved and immortal, Francesco smells the scent of freshly-cut flowers and furniture polish. The memory of Guglielmo laughing as a child while Maddalena chased him walks him step by step into the spectre of a life he had forgotten. 

Francesco drops the duffel bag by the fireplace and rests his fingers on the hard stone, remembering the time when Jacopo used to smile for other reasons than business and victory, when his aunt gathered them all in the dining room to play cards and have an excuse to spend some time with _“her boys”_ and she taught Francesco and Guglielmo how to cheat without getting caught. She was a beautiful woman, aunt Maddalena – although not astonishing – kind and graceful, but also gifted with the lethal power to suck the life away from a room as soon as she was gone, and Jacopo had married her with the strong belief he’d be able to drink from her lips anything he’d need until the day of his death. 

Francesco feels a lump clutching at his throat and for a moment it’s like vertigo, all the burden of a future which has never been and a past which has gone lost. But now the years have passed, blown away as if they were smoke covered by fog and words have been wasted, and this country home is nothing but a carved cave filled with carefully-furnished, empty rooms. It’s just a vestibule to amble from one side to another, from one present to another. 

Everything else is just a blurred outline at the corner of the eye. 

Giuliano lays a hand on his shoulder and Francesco represses a shiver.

“You ready, Cesco?”

 _Cesco_ , a nickname he hasn’t heard since a drunken trip to Barcelona which he spent drinking sips of cheap beer from Lorenzo’s mouth. 

“Call me that again and I’ll break your arm.”

Giuliano smirks proudly, blue eyes twinkling despite the deep and dark trenches under his eyes, and for a moment there’s the streaked flicker of a much younger boy on his face, just beneath the too-pale layer of his skin. If Francesco were to reach out with his fingers he could touch him, pull him up over the surface before he drowns. 

Giuliano doesn’t want to die, and at least of that Francesco is sure. He has only forgotten what living tastes like, and he doesn’t know which flavours to lick to find his hunger again. 

“Come, the bedrooms are upstairs.”

Francesco skips the third step, the one which creaks, without even thinking, the habit of keeping quiet when he moves around the house still ingrained in him as if it were yesterday that he stayed up without his uncle’s permission. They walk past the open doors of a playroom Jacopo had designed for children who had never been born and of a sewing room which Maddalena had repurposed to a reading space, but it’s the third door left ajar that hits Francesco like a punch in the gut and stops him from going forward. 

He’s sure he had told to leave it shut and untouched, the key even twice-turned inside the lock to be sure he would not give in to temptation, and yet there it is, a glimmer of light cutting in whites and yellows the walnut wood of the doorframe. 

Francesco bites the inside of his cheek and turns the other way.

“Is it Jacopo’s room?” Giuliano guesses at once. 

Francesco only nods and starts to walk past but Giuliano blocks him.

“You mustn’t let it frighten you. He can’t do you any harm now.”

Francesco sighs and runs a hand through his hair, hoping to drive the thoughts away from his face. “It’s not a matter of fear. It’s–” Anger, for what Jacopo did. Hatred, for what he tried to do. Regret, for what Francesco _let him_ do. “It’s everything else.”

“This place is yours now. You can fill it with whatever you want.”

With a careless shrug, Giuliano takes the southern room that has always been Guglielmo’s, the one facing the ground pool. In the meanwhile, Francesco works up the courage to enter his uncle’s room, he takes a look around, recognises the items and the bedsheets as if it were yesterday that he and Guglielmo were jumping on the bed playing cowboys and Indians, but back then Francesco was barely ten and he was even short for his age. 

A whole lifetime has passed. 

With a sigh and a tight lump in his throat, Francesco locks in a drawer the photograph of his father laughing as a young man at Jacopo and Maddalena’s wedding, and he decides that from now on he’s done with ghosts. It’s better if only the living hurt him: at least you can fight with and shout at the living. At least they can still stay and listen. 

⁂

The rope breaks in the evening, when he finds Giuliano sitting on the grass on the hill, licking the edge of a thin and slightly crinkled rolling paper. 

Francesco flops down beside him, hair still damp from the shower. 

“Have you ever been to see the clock in Piazza Grande? We can take a tour of the city tomorrow and I’ll show you, if you like. They had to send for a clockmaker from abroad for the ’98 renovation, I think from Bulgaria or some other country there. It’s the only one in Italy that also tracks the position of the sun and the moon–”

Giuliano lights his joint and offers him a smile. “Do you really want to talk about clocks?”

“Are you in the mood to talk about anything else?”

“Like?” 

“About Lorenzo and Clarice. And about their son.”

“Daughter,” Giuliano corrects him as he inhales his first puff. “It seems like the baby’s going to be a girl. Clarice would like to name her Maddalena, but we know Lorenzo will get his way in the end, as usual. No one can ever say no to my brother.”

Not even Giuliano. Not even Francesco. They’ve never been able to break away from his mouth and his fingers. They close their eyes and they can still feel him on their bodies, with his clean scent and his light words that ensnare you as if you were an animal fallen into a trap. Lorenzo catches wild people and tames them with a smile and a caress, he explains them the meaning of the sun and of love and those old feral beasts are left with just a whine in their throat and the wish for another caress. 

They should almost take it out on him, get mad at Lorenzo for what he does to people, weren’t it for the fact that everything Lorenzo does is to bring out the best in them, because he has this hope and blind trust in the future and he wants to believe he can make the world a slightly better place to live in. 

Giuliano shudders nervously. He kicks a clump of dirt and brings the filter to his lips again. 

“It’s unbelievable, you know? I’ve never wanted to be a father and I’ve never wanted to marry, and I’d surely wouldn’t have wanted it even if she were still here. I mean, yes, maybe I would’ve done it for her, but for her, not for me. And yet, since Lorenzo told me I can’t stop thinking about how it would’ve been if she had left her husband in time. If we had–” Giuliano sighs and runs a tired hand over his face. “Well, you know.” 

Yes. Yes, sure. Francesco didn’t manage to see Giuliano with Simonetta – and it’s better this way, because only knowing that there has been someone this important is wedging stones in his guts and Francesco doesn’t want to think about it – nevertheless, he can see how her death has left such deep wounds that it sank Giuliano into what he stubbornly refuses to call depression and yet carries all the symptoms. So Francesco can guess how discovering that life goes on, literally in this case, after her – _despite_ her – has thrown sand in his eyes.

Giuliano inhales through gritted teeth, he pulls air and smoke into his lungs with an anger made up of cold ashes and of a resignation that has bled to death. He looks straight ahead, towards the city lights which twinkle below, where the people who laugh and trudge down the streets don’t care about anything that happened between them two or about the night when Lorenzo didn’t return home because he had fallen asleep on Francesco’s bed together with Giuliano, and Francesco had kept looking at them for minutes and hours without the strength to ask himself questions. 

The people in the city below are graced with ignorance and here only the hill illuminated by the stars and the waning moon knows how life in Florence is a huge, stunning mess and that you can feel cold during summer too. 

Giuliano laughs and Francesco gets goosebumps despite the heat and the humidity placidly spread on his skin. “Did you know that I was holding her hand? I felt the moment when she was gone. I had it between my fingers.” He inhales another drag and his eyes are turning red already, the tip of his little finger trembling. “It’s my fault for not holding her strong enough. I should’ve kept her closer.”

“It doesn’t work like that, Giuliano.”

“No, I know. I know. But at least it makes sense like this.”

Francesco throws his arm around Giuliano’s back, keeping him close, and Giuliano rests his head in the hollow of his shoulder. 

“How’s Novella?” Giuliano asks him after sticking the joint between his fingers. Novella who’s talking about coming back home – although _home_ is Florence, not Venice. It’s never been Venice – and, even if she has never said it out loud, they know it’s because Francesco has changed, because he has signed an armistice with the worst part of himself. 

Now, it’s up to his best part to decide whether he should play the game or keep watching. 

“She’s fine.”

“Listen, tell me the truth: did you sleep with her again?”

Francesco takes a drag of smoke. 

“Yes.”

Many times, between fresh sheets and with his hands still tainted with the scent of Lorenzo. Sometimes also with Giuliano’s. Novella hasn’t even pretended she did not recognise that different taste in his mouth: she has smirked and asked – nearly demanded – _“Show me what it was like,”_ with that sultry voice which has yielded a bit under the weight of a foreign accent. 

Francesco would like to turn his head the other way and say that this manner she has of accepting him, so visceral and careless, did not intoxicate him with affection and made his blood boil up to his heart, but he’s trying to stop lying to himself. Novella is that extra touch in his chest that he hasn’t missed that much, not as much as Giuliano and Lorenzo, but he surely needs it to stand on his feet. 

Giuliano murmurs his assent and nods. 

“Are you two getting back together?”

Francesco is not even surprised that Giuliano has guessed it already, that he’s heard its footfalls coming from across the street. He’s always been like that: never figured what the fuck to do with himself, eyes and focus turned solely to the people surrounding him. 

“There were many reasons why we broke up last time. Not many have changed. We work better as friends.”

Francesco hands him back the joint and Giuliano secures it between his middle and ring finger. He turns his head and rubs his nose on those few inches of soft and smooth skin just below Francesco’s ear, and for a split second, Francesco shivers. He waits for a kiss, a bite, the wet wake of Giuliano’s warm tongue along his neck, but no. No, because Giuliano isn’t done talking yet. Because at least one of them has learned something.

“Okay. Thank you for your honesty.”

“That’s how it’s done, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. They say that’s how it should be.”

“Do you believe it?”

“Sure.”

And eventually, Francesco’s head is spinning. They look into each other’s eyes, his arm still around Giuliano’s shoulders, and they share a smile before kissing, before meeting each other’s breath. 

This is one of the great things about Giuliano: with him, your body becomes lightweight instead of a burden, something to use to wrap yourself around life and watch it from afar instead of bearing its weight. Giuliano can make love without cinching an anchor around your neck; he gives and that’s it, he doesn’t ask for anything more lasting than an orgasm and a flutter of heart. 

Francesco pushes him down with his back on the grass, the joint still held tight between Giuliano’s fingers which aren’t pulling Francesco’s hair to keep him in place on his mouth. Francesco tastes incense and beer on his tongue, he lays his hips on Giuliano’s groin and he lowers himself slowly to kiss his chin and neck until the skin underneath his lips reddens, and he realises that this is how he fell in love with Giuliano the first time: because Giuliano hadn’t demanded anything from him, not time nor sweet words, just the honesty of a body seeking another, and that was all Francesco was able to offer at the time. Besides Novella, no one had ever understood him: not Lorenzo who persisted on conjuring in him an interest in the world that wasn’t his, not his brother Guglielmo who looked at him for the approval and safety that Jacopo had never given them, not even before Maddalena’s passing.

Unlike any of them, Giuliano had understood. Giuliano had followed him down the alleys of Florence at sixteen and took cover beneath the arches of Palazzo Pitti with a bottle of vodka in his hand, which then they had smashed while drunk to cut their thumbs with the glass and lick each other’s blood saying, _“And now you’ll never get it off your mouth. It’s not a bloodpact: it’s an ingestion. You can’t ever leave .”_

And sure enough Francesco has never managed to. Four autumns later they broke each other’s nose, Francesco punched Giuliano’s face and kicked his kidneys as he lay on the ground, only to find himself at thirty-five years old begging for forgiveness and taking him to the country home in order to save themselves both from the arms and splendour of Lorenzo, so wide they can hold everyone safely against his chest where a normal person would be barely able to make room for one. 

And everything’s fine, everything’s marvellous, congratulations to you, Lorenzo, congratulations to you and to your heart thought for giants, but in the meantime, the knowledge of being many instead of one or just a few more hurts. Lorenzo has a heart that is simply too big for the good of those who love him, and Giuliano’s chest, which Francesco’s stripping of his t-shirt and kissing, is bleeding beneath its skin, beneath the outline of his muscles and the layer of taut flesh. 

Francesco unbuttons Giuliano’s jeans and even though he already has an inkling to the answer, he asks, “Do you want to go indoors?”

Giuliano shakes his head and inhales two last puffs of smoke from the joint consumed by the light breeze blowing on the hill. He sprawls on the grass and looks up at those stars which shine brighter when they’re far from city lights and pollution. 

“No, I want to look at the sky as you make me come. I want to touch the stars,” he answers indeed, and Francesco lowers his trousers and boxers past his thighs. Perhaps it’s the smoke or the jitters talking, but after all Giuliano loves books and poetry as much as Lorenzo, he is well acquainted with music and paintings, and once Francesco happened upon him staring with horror and awe at Hecuba’s anguish under the Loggia dei Lanzi. However, unlike his brother, Giuliano keeps all his flights and raptures to himself, locked as safely as coins inside a coffer. 

Francesco kisses with fervour the crook above Giuliano’s hipbone where a tattoo has left a scar. It’s too dark outside to see it, but Francesco knows it’s there, he finds it with his lips where two swallows once stood out with their wings outstretched, and Giuliano has had them removed without telling anyone. One day they were there, a testament to a time when he had loved and hoped, and the next day they weren’t anymore. Each person has their coping mechanisms: some people don’t want to forget the pain while some try to erase any evidence instead.

Francesco kisses those vanished swallows and bites them until he hears Giuliano hiss, he leaves the brand of another kind of love, a mark that needs revamping day after day so it won’t fade away but it isn’t necessarily bound to stay forever. It’s the kind of mark which Giuliano appreciates more. 

When Francesco finally takes him between his lips and strokes him with his tongue, a relieved moan reaches his ears. Giuliano’s fingers slip through his hair, his nails grazing him gently with no intention to scratch, and Francesco relaxes his mouth and throat until even the air tastes like Giuliano’s skin. He listens to him groaning and sighing and he forgets about everything: Florence, Lorenzo and his children, both the ones already born and those coming, the aligned coffins of his family and the rooms he hasn’t been able to fill with a new one yet. Right now there are only Francesco and Giuliano, he and Giuliano and the blasphemies he hears him shout to the sky as Giuliano pulls at his hair with clenched fists and comes in his mouth, and his taste is completely different from the blood they sucked at sixteen and nineteen, and yet the result is the same: it’s something he will never wash off from his tongue. _It’s an ingestion, not a bloodpact. I swallowed and drank you mixed with air and spit, and now you’ll stay inside me and you’ll never leave._

⁂

Giuliano stretches his arms out and loosens up his shoulders, the weary and cloudy listlessness of someone who’s been fucked to inebriation written all over his body. He kicks down the surviving flap of bedsheets and rolls towards Francesco, a haze of pleasure still visible beneath his eyelids.

“Do you have a cigarette?”

“Since when have you been smoking cigarettes again?”

“I’ve just given you my ass, the least you can do is leaving me a cigarette.”

Francesco chuckles and pokes him with the heel of his foot. “You didn’t seem to mind that much.”

“Not at all. That’s why a drag would be great now.”

Francesco snorts and retrieves his new packet of red Marlboro from the nightstand. He rips off the paper and keeps it hidden in his fist as he carefully pries out one cigarette for himself and one for Giuliano. They pass each other the lighter and he discards the scrap paper in the ashtray. The smoke tickles his nostrils and scratches his throat, and Francesco closes his eyes relaxing his already loosen and exhausted muscles. He’s got the scent of quiet and sex down his nose and a warm tingle runs along his veins. 

Giuliano rests an elbow on his chest and calls his name. 

“Do you still remember our trip to Barcelona, when I graduated high school?”

Francesco nods. “I especially remember that fucking song you put in my music player.”

“My moment of glory,” Giuliano laughs as he drags a slow and nostalgic puff. “That trip has been my happiest memory since I was born. I believed I had everything in my hands. I had both you and Lorenzo and no one could tell us anything.”

“We’re here now too”

“Yeah, but it’s not like it was back then.”

Giuliano stretches over Francesco’s legs to grab the ashtray and chews a curse between his teeth.

“Everything alright?”

“Yes. I might even be able to sit again in two days.”

“You’re exaggerating. It’s not as if I went in dry.”

Giuliano whines under his breath, “Please. It hurts just to hear you say it.” He places the ashtray on the bed between them and he lays his back against the headboard, sitting still to listen to the rhythmic ticking of a clock forgotten on one of the restored drawers. 

Francesco reckons that wherever his uncle Jacopo’s soul may be at this moment – assuming he still had a shred of soul left before his death – it’s probably kicking up a fuss at the idea of his nephew fucking a Medici in the bed which belonged to him. 

It’s an interesting way to begin the future: by desecrating everything which used to be sacred in the past. It’s even poetic, Dante and his law of counterbalance and all that jazz. 

If he expressed his reasoning out loud, Francesco is sure Giuliano would appreciate the irony. Maybe he’s already doing so without Francesco telling him they thought about the same thing.

But Giuliano keeps silent, and that’s not good. Giuliano always talks, even after sex, even after love when he should only close his eyes and let himself be lulled to sleep by the afterglow and the spentness. 

“Giuliano, don’t think about her. Doing it now is just torture.”

Giuliano answers with a grimace and with tears held back in his voice. Francesco is tempted to tell him that he can, that he can let go and cry, but he acknowledges how Giuliano is attempting to learn how to stop, how he wants to cut down the sorrow that pours from his eyes and down his chin. “Sometimes I wish I had died with her. Everything would have been easier.”

“Don’t even joke about it.”

“Why? It’s true. It’s not like I have much to do here, I might as well have gone with her.”

“No, this is bullshit. When you were in the hospital, I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t find the strength to call Lorenzo to ask about you.” Francesco inhales a hasty drag of his cigarette and ditches the remainders of shame he had uselessly clung to. “I’ve even tried to write to him, but in the end I was holding a letter I could neither finish nor throw away.”

Giuliano listens to him, he devotes to him the attention and interest which usually only Lorenzo can captivate. “What has changed then? How was it that you were at the hospital in the end?"

“I realised that being by your side was more important than the rest.”

“What rest?”

“All the rest. I realised that there was no sense in a world without you and Lorenzo and that I ought to have told you.”

Giuliano winces and clicks his tongue with a resigned sigh.

“Lorenzo won’t leave Clarice. He wouldn’t have done it before and he certainly won’t now that the baby’s on her way.”

“I know. I’ve never expected him to.”

Because trying to be the only one for Lorenzo is like lying on a field on your naked back to look at the sky: you can stretch your hands towards the sun until your palm covers it and you think you’re holding it, but in fact it’s always too far to let you touch it. And even if you managed to, you’d die burning. 

However, Francesco and Giuliano have the soul of Icarus and they keep on trying anyway, it doesn’t matter if it hurts. 

“You know, my brother might have married Clarice because our mother wanted him to settle down and he indulged her, but in the end he really fell in love with her. Though, if Clarice knew–” about Francesco and Lorenzo, about their past, their future, about everything that runs between the two of them and Giuliano. If she knew about Lorenzo and Giuliano– “all hell would break loose. She’s not mean, but she wouldn’t get it.”

“That’s understandable. Some days I don’t get it either.”

Giuliano shrugs and steals the cigarette from his fingers to snatch the last drag before putting it out. “We’re Medici. Sometimes we do things just because we feel like it.”

“I’m not a Medici, though.”

“That’s trash. You know it’s not true.”

Francesco darts a confused glance at him and Giuliano answers with a smile, “You put my blood in your mouth. By now you should know you won’t get rid of it even if you want to.”

And after all, he knows Francesco doesn’t want to.


	3. (and maybe you'll understand) All angels have bird wings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _You are the perfect picture of what I’ve always looked for_   
>  _Fragile soul, without a sin._   
>  _Because the world is spinning with us_   
>  _And you can never deny it_   
>  _And ‘though you will be far from me_   
>  _Remember that you can live of me,_   
>  _And everything falls down when I look for you and you’re not there_   
>    
>  **In which angels fall when they lose their wings, and yet Giuliano sees her flying away all the same.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title and excerpt in the summary from [_Piume_](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dg6GXUmFlw4) by Leo Gassmann  
>   
>  **Warnings updated** : Major Character Death (but if you watched 2x06 you know what we're talking about)  
>   
> CHAPTER DETAILS  
>  **rating:** M  
>  **pairings:** Giuliano/Simonetta, Giuliano/Lorenzo/Francesco  
>  **tags:** Infidelity, Hospitalization

  
  


Moodboard crossposted from [Tumblr](https://ueberdemnebelmeer.tumblr.com/post/186476234948)

* * *

Giuliano has always seen love, sure, but only from afar, on the threshold of his brother’s bedroom as Lorenzo gets dressed or underlines the pages of a book with his pencil and takes notes in the margins, or in Guglielmo’s cupid’s bow, so arched when he smiles at Bianca. For a while, he believed he had touched it in the worn edges of Francesco’s hands, on his torn knuckles and under the nails with which they’d scratched each other. But now, time has passed and Giuliano wonders whether he got it wrong, if he was mistaken. He’s not sure whether the days when he thought it really was love hurt more or less than those when he suspects it was just a bundle of tired solidarity, hormones and resignation. There’s a bump left on his nose where Francesco broke it; Giuliano has seen him around and, even though he wasn’t close enough to be entirely certain of it, he’s also pretty sure that Francesco’s teeth aren’t exactly as straight as they were before the night when they spat blood on each other’s faces under the beams of the streetlights. 

For Giuliano, love has never been a quiet business: it’s either everything or nothing. So, when he sees Simonetta for the first time, when he meets her miffed gaze and her upturned nose scrunched with muted annoyance, he realises that it’s going to be _everything_ and that _nothing_ will be his life if he doesn’t get the chance to put his hands on her arms, to feel the warmth of her skin against his mouth and to hear her laugh. 

Giuliano is not in love yet, he is just fascinated, but something in Simonetta’s cold demeanour yells and shouts like a caged bird, and Giuliano knows – _knows_ – that two people could fly on those wings, and he has never been afraid of falling, merely of dying before sampling everything the world has to offer. So his first step towards Simonetta, his first arrogant smile to which she answers with a raised eyebrow and a stiff nod of her head, are an enthusiastic toast to the life stretching out ahead of them. 

Giuliano takes her hand and bows, he brushes his lips against her long, slender fingers just below her wedding band, in a hand-kiss which tastes as much of a mockery as of elation. And, unwillingly, Simonetta smiles, almost surprised by her own reaction. 

From that moment onwards, it’s just a steep descent down a cliff from which they can no longer save themselves. 

⁂

Sandro photographs her from all perspectives, under the shade of trees and quelled by the midday light in a wheat field. He piles up photoshoots over photoshoots for Vespucci’s magazine, and for every picture he takes there are at least thirty snapshots of Simonetta looking at the sky with her eyes open and her hair covered by a light-blue lace veil. 

Then Sandro sees them together, he observes how Simonetta’s fingers linger for one more split second before they let go of Giuliano’s, and an incredible thing happens: Sandro picks up painting again. He hasn’t since he has graduated from art school, more impressed by the power and immediacy of the camera than by the muffled, fallacious quality of brushes, and yet something about Simonetta – no, something about the glances Giuliano and Simonetta exchange between each other, about the way they can’t take their hands and eyes off each other – reawakens his love for the canvas and the palette stained with pink and yellow blotches. 

The smell of turpentine makes Giuliano sick and his head spins, but he tunes it out and endures it. He lies still for hours on a table covered by a white drape, Simonetta resting her foot just above his calf, and that small touch is enough to make him smile. 

One evening, Sandro leaves him the keys to his studio and pleads him to close shop in his stead, ‘cause some shit went down with Angelo and Lorenzo is at home panicking for Piero’s first fever so he can’t sort the issue first-hand. Giuliano’s lopsided smile is anything but reassuring to Sandro, but in the end Giuliano and Simonetta are left alone alongside a thousand promises that they will stow away the paint tubes and they won’t touch his equipment. 

That evening, Giuliano dips his fingers in Sandro’s oil paints and draws on Simonetta’s body all the marks he can’t leave with his hands and mouth, he writes love lyrics along her legs with blue-stained fingertips,he sings odes to the beauty-spots on her back, flattening his hand and counting her vertebrae one by one, up from her neck and down to her hips. He takes pictures with his phone of her hand trying to cover her breast and leaving a green streak below her taut nipple. After spreading her legs and making love to her, he takes photos of her lying on the same table on which they pose for Sandro, and the droplets of come and sweat crown her belly like rain gliding down her flushed skin. He takes those pictures because once they’ back to their separate places, they’ll have to stand eyes-shut and open-mouthed under the spray of the shower and wash away the evidence, rub a sponge soaked in oil and soap to erase any scent, scrub away the paint smeared by their fingerprints. However, Giuliano doesn’t want to forget the memory of Simonetta’s hopeful and loving smile, of her body, slender and dirty for him: that needs to remain carved, seared behind his eyelids and beneath the calluses on his hands. He wants to engrave it on his bones, where not even the God Clarice and Lorenzo pray to on Sundays could snatch it from. 

The following morning, Sandro doesn’t ask questions over the colours splattered on the once pristine table, but when he catches the keys Giuliano throws at him, Sandro calls him back before Giuliano can cross the threshold and leave. Giuliano stops, one foot past the door already, the other pawing the ground and eager to flip the kick-stand of his bike and hit the gas as the engine roars. 

He sees in Sandro’s clenched jaw the same worry which sometimes furrows Lorenzo’s and their mother’s brow, and Giuliano can’t help feeling guilty, albeit only a little. He’s used to making trouble; however, he’s not used to seeing the people around him worrying about it. Usually, he’s not the important one. 

Sandro’s mouth is a thin line and he sucks his lip. “Be careful, Giuliano, okay?”

Giuliano answers with a light-hearted grin and a shrug, “I’ll do my best.”

The truth is, it’s already too late to be careful now. 

He leaves whistling a tune he has heard on the radio, one of those summer hits he sets as his ringtones just for the sake of vexing anyone within earshot, and all the while as he rides, he writes letters and poems in his head, like those Lorenzo used to create for Lucrezia Donati, like those he won’t ever create for Clarice even though Clarice would definitely deserve them more than Lucrezia ever did. 

They’re words that Giuliano will never speak out loud. Not because he might be ashamed of them but because they’re unlike him, they’re not what Simonetta expects from him, what she asks of him; so, even though he’s ready to pick up a pen and let love poems flow on wine-dotted and lampblack-stained paper, Giuliano keeps everything locked inside, secret, safe. There’s no risk of being blamed if no one ever hears. 

He snorts and stifles his laughter as he recalls the lines he studied and repeated to death for his literature class in high school, words he always found pretentious and exaggerated before: “ _With love's light wings did I o'er-perch these walls; for stony limits cannot hold love out, and what love can do that dares love attempt._ ”

They don’t sound so absurd or hyperbolic now. 

His skin itches, prickles. 

Maybe there is a promise he’s willing to put on paper. Ink on another kind of paper. On parchment. 

⁂

Simonetta is ticklish. Giuliano enjoys breathing on her hips and watching her skin raise in goosebumps, he listens to her while she shivers and scolds him and she gets a hold of the sheets to shield herself from his nagging fingers. 

Giuliano grabs her by the ankles and pulls her close, falling on his knees on the mattress of a hotel bed. 

Vespucci would like to set up an exhibition so Sandro must take pictures, steal the corner of her jaw cast in sunlight and the highlights of her blonde hair brought out by several flickering candles. In front of the monsters of Bomarzo, Sandro takes care of bringing out the fairy goddess that’s in her; he compares her to the Juliet in Verona, one of bronze and fake and cold whose breast is polished by all the hands that touched it, the other so real and welcoming in her dress of flesh that being close to her is akin to insulting all the gods mankind has come up with over the millennia. 

Giuliano has always been blasphemous, more curses than blessings in his mouth, so he fills his hands with Simonetta’s body. He leaves the subtle delight of glimpsing at the divine in her to the onlookers: Giuliano is knowledgeable about anything that is mortal and worldly and he knows that there’s more divinity in the flesh than in a consecrated host. Even their Virgin Mary was a woman whose husband embraced her and traced her outlines at night.

Simonetta giggles, pleased when Giuliano kisses her naked calf left exposed by her skirt. Her amused smile and the boundless emotion shining in her blue eyes aren’t there when she’s with her husband. Giuliano has seen Marco Vespucci only a few times but they’ve been enough to notice how his wife’s beauty has blinded him to everything that Simonetta actually is.

He has no pity for such a man, nor does he excuse or forgive someone who has the meaning of life written in plain sight and can’t decode its language. 

Giuliano slips his fingers underneath the lacy hem of Simonetta’s underwear, and he counts the smooth inches over which her knickers slide before fluttering to the ground. He thanks her for being there with him with feathery kisses as delicate as her voice, he writes messages on her thighs with his nails, because this time they’re going to spend two whole weeks around Italy and so those scratches will heal before the Arno is back in sight. For once, they can finally do whatever the fuck they want with each other. 

Anyway, Simonetta is gentle. She leans on him as if she were a dove whose feathers are made of crystal, as if she were afraid her arms could break him, crack him. She still doesn’t get that of the two of them, it’s Giuliano who’s the splintered piece, the one who’s got a hole embedded in his body shaped like her breasts and her rosy cheeks. 

Giuliano hooks his fingers in his t-shirt, just below his nape, and he slides it off, tossing it carelessly to the floor to consort with Simonetta’s lingerie. She blinks and frowns, a sneer curling her face in astonishment. 

“What’s that?”

“You’ve said you love swallows, haven’t you?”

“Yes, because they remind me of spring. But you don’t like them.”

Giuliano shrugs. “I didn’t do this for myself,” he explains tracing the tip of his index and middle finger over the tattoo that stands out just above the jut of his hipbone. “It’s to always have you on me. This is something we can show everyone. Who would say anything about it?”

Simonetta licks her lips thoughtfully, then her face opens up with a smile. “I could do that too; have two swallows tattooed to have you with me at all times.” 

Giuliano lowers himself over her, he rests his elbows on the bed and kisses her forehead, the tip of her nose. He sighs on her lips that, “I like it. I'll be able to get under your clothes even when I’m not next to you,” because love made with bodies is something he understands, something he masters, something he appreciates and welcomes without a fuss. 

Giuliano would tear the world apart for her, he would throw rocks at it and would yell at it to let him touch her, let him kiss her, breathe her. 

When they’re back to Florence, they don’t even get to talk to the tattoo-artist: one morning, Simonetta wakes up with her head spinning and the feel of a hand scratching her throat and by noon her husband is driving her to the A&E at Santa Maria Nuova. 

⁂

Months go by. _Months._ It’s nothing short of a miracle for an immunosuppressed individual. 

One day, the head physician shakes his head and gives Giuliano a broken smile. He says that at this point, love is the only thing keeping her alive. She should have died weeks ago but Simonetta holds on to her strings with such tenacity it is almost touching. Almost endearing. 

If it’s love that is still keeping Simonetta alive, then Giuliano isn’t sure whether to hate it or not, because each day in which her eyes remain open adds another grain of self-deception to the pile, and Giuliano can’t help hoping. Praying. Giuliano, for the first time in his life, _prays,_ with his head bowed and his hands folded as he kneels before the Cross, because if he shows enough deference then God might absolve him for his never-ending list of sins and feel sorry for the woman who has finally accomplished the feat of breathing a gust of faith into his heart.

However, God is Father, not Mother. Lucrezia has always been willing to turn a blind eye to Giuliano’s thousand shortcomings while Piero had preferred to stop looking at him in the eye and expecting anything from him. Mothers give life to their children and fathers grab them by their hair and send them to war commanding them to bring glory to their family, demanding to make them proud. Mothers forgive, they overlook; fathers don’t. Fathers don’t forgive sons like Giuliano. They save that mercy for the sons who truly deserve their fatherly understanding, for sons like Lorenzo, those for whom guilt erases the pleasure of sin and turns the memory of honey to poison. 

And so God doesn’t give a fuck about Giuliano’s newly-found faith and He takes Simonetta in retribution, He takes her away with a cruel smile and brings her where she should have always stayed. 

It’s a ruthless struggle, the one between them two, a tug-of-war in which Giuliano clutches one end of Simonetta’s soul, holds onto it with every ounce of his strength, whereas God needs simply to pluck the strings holding up her life to make them creak and cave like the stem of a torn-off flower. 

He is to blame for trying to believe. He is to blame for having dared to, for falling in love with an otherworldly angel when he’s just a filthy, mortal thing. He made Simonetta come down, forced her to fall at the very moment she folded her white wings for him. 

An echo, “ _She should have died hereafter. There would have been a time for such a word. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow._ ”

And tomorrow has come. 

⁂

Sandro turns the key in the lock and hurries to disconnect the alarm system before it goes off. 

Giuliano begrudgingly follows him, drags his feet on the opalescent marble floor only because Lorenzo is behind him, urging him forwards. 

Sandro flips the switches, and for a split second the neon lights and lamps hanging from the ceiling blind Giuliano, and he groans and raises a hand to shield his drunken eyes. 

“The exhibition opens tomorrow but...” Sandro falters, “Vespucci is going to be there.”

“Am I supposed to care?”

“I thought you might like to see…” Sandro sighs. “Well, that’s it. This is all I have of her, all I have left.”

“The paintings, too?”

Giuliano has no actual intention to sound so disrespectful, so tired. And yet his voice is bitter and exasperated all the same as it reverberates in the huge, underpopulated hall. 

Sandro stiffens and looks down. 

“No, Vespucci took them.”

“Of course.”

Giuliano glances distractedly at the walls where dozens of frames hang. Beneath each glass pane, underneath the transparent glaze protecting them, Simonetta sneers at him or sets her eyes on the horizon without even deigning to look back at his dim and bloodshot gaze.

It’s a mockery. A travesty. 

This is not an exhibition: it’s a mausoleum, an indulgent ode to a woman whom neither Sandro not Marco Vespucci have ever understood. They have admired her, studied her, maybe they even recognised the perfume which used to dab her throat and wrists, but what do they know of the sound of her bare feet approaching the bed in the quiet of the night? What do they know of what she thought of Florence, of how she compared the country hills to the spires of Genoa and how she yearned for the Ligurian Sea and its pebbly shores? What do they know of how grey her skin was on the day she died, grey and pale as if she were a skeletal corpse already driven solely by that violent and hideous thing called love?

 _Love_. Giuliano treats that word with only contempt by now. 

The Simonetta he sees within those pictures is fake. It’s a nice cover embossed on a surface and printed with professional ink. It’s an object, a _subject_. It’s not Simonetta. 

“Giuliano?” Lorenzo senses something. He worries. Why does he? Giuliano hasn’t done anything yet.

His brother is about to rest a hand on his shoulder but Giuliano dodges him and leaves, the gaping door and Lorenzo and Sandro’s frightened cries behind him. 

He doesn’t remember the three days afterwards. The entire year that follows is just a vague and sour fog. 

Only one thing is seared clearly in his memory: it hurts. Everywhere, it hurts. It hurts so much it’s killing him. 

⁂

_“Sharper than dying is the death for the dying's sake._ ”

Giuliano reads those words under his breath, rolls them on his tongue as if they were a gust of wind. There is something comforting in having anything that touched Simonetta in his mouth, even if it is just the verses of her favourite poetess. 

He chose the engraving for the epigraph himself. He suggested it to Marco when he promised he wouldn’t show up for the funeral. It wasn’t even a huge loss for Giuliano: he wasn’t interested in saying farewell to an empty and cold body, not when he used to be so familiar with how lying beside her heat felt like, so he allowed Marco Vespucci to cling to one last shred of dignity, the fine calligraphy of his reputation. Because, in the end, that’s the only thing little men like him survive on nowadays: fame, their good name. The illusion of owning and knowing things.

At least Giuliano has come to the conclusion that he won’t ever know anything, that whatever he’s holding in his hands can break free at any moment and that the amount of experiences and emotions he can absorb before the day tears them away from his grasp is the only way he can exert control over the world. 

Giuliano has turned from lion to dog, ready to growl and bite, from a beast that should only be admired from afar behind the safety of iron bars, to an animal which has no master. He has a family, though, and he will stand guard and be ready to tear off the hands and arms of looming prowlers before they even manage to strike. 

Giuliano is still firm in his belief that there is no God up there and he makes no secret of it. The divine lies in the living, in his brother’s laughter and in the cautious manner with which Francesco is learning to trust him and Lorenzo. 

If someone were to find a reason to exist, Giuliano’s is to protect, it’s the meaning that he – not _God_ – has chosen for himself: to get there, he had to wake up tired and cold at night and see Francesco already reaching around with his arm to rearrange the blankets on him . He had to meet Lorenzo’s bright eyes at the other end of a corridor and let him drag him to the windows to watch Clarice playing with Piero and Contessina in the courtyard. He had to carry a casket so small it was frightening while Guglielmo and Bianca wept, and then he put a swing together for Giovanna in their garden – she’s too little to play with it on her own, but she’ll grow up. She _will_ grow up. 

Giuliano would have torn the world apart for Simonetta. Now, as Lorenzo’s palm warms up his back and Francesco holds an arm around his shoulders, he reckons he’d be even willing to fix it for the two of them. After all, the pieces are right there, within his reach. They almost call to him. 

“ _And ruined love, when it is built anew, grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater._ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mentioned quotations:  
> 
> 
>   * “ _With love's light wings did I o'er-perch these walls; for stony limits cannot hold love out, and what love can do that dares love attempt._ ” - W. Shakespeare, _Romeo and Juliet_ , Act II, Scene 2
>   * “ _She should have died hereafter. There would have been a time for such a word. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow._ ” - W. Shakespeare, _Macbeth_ , Act V, Scene 5
>   * “ _Sharper than dying is the death for the dying's sake._ ” - Emily Dickinson, Letter to Mrs. J.G. Holland ( _Letter 311_ ), early Nov. 1865
>   * “ _And ruined love, when it is built anew, grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater._ ” - W. Shakespeare, _Sonnet 119_
> 

> 
> I'll bake you virtual cakes if you reblog the [promo on Tumblr](https://ueberdemnebelmeer.tumblr.com/post/186476234948)! :)


	4. The lovely Marlena (there’s no wound, there’s no scar)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _My friend, you ought to be happy because the new world is coming_   
>  _And there’s no wound, there’s no scar this passion can’t heal_   
>  _God, like a phoenix from the ashes I rose and learnt to fly_   
>  _Just because I packed my bags and kissed the lovely Marlena_   
>    
>  **In which Francesco, Giuliano and Lorenzo hop on a plane and all their troubles are still far away.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title and excerpt in the summary from [_Un'altra dimensione_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJ3tee-JZ64) by Måneskin  
>   
> This chapter takes place before the previous three: Giuliano is nearly 20, Lorenzo is 22 and Francesco 23. Historical age differences weren’t taken into account, just their simple birthdays  
>   
>  **Overall rating updated** : Explicit  
>   
> CHAPTER DETAILS  
>  **rating:** E  
>  **pairings:** Giuliano/Lorenzo/Francesco, Novella/Francesco  
>  **tags:** Sibling Incest

  
  
  


Moodboard crossposted from [Tumblr](https://ueberdemnebelmeer.tumblr.com/post/186709707898)

* * *

### 4.1 Marlena, yes, take me dancing

They land in Catalonia armed with two suitcases and maybe three hours of sleep behind them – in Francesco’s case it’s less than that because he knew that waking up at four a.m. to catch a plane would have been science fiction for him, so he pulled an all-nighter from the previous morning, hoping to catch a wink during the flight. He had not thought that: _Giuliano_.

They had got on the plane when the sunrise hadn’t even been through yet because Giuliano’s current exceptional idea is that arriving in Barcelona in the morning would give them the perfect chance to pick up the keys to the flat they have rented, drop their luggage there and already hit the beach to roast themselves under the August sun. Francesco would gladly bang Giuliano’s head against some of the sharp edges of the Sagrada Familia, but Lorenzo seems even more enthusiastic than his brother. And in the end, the one amongst them who always manages to turn everyone around is Lorenzo. Quiet and unassuming with his gentle smiles and carefully chosen words, every single one of them chiselled and adorned, Lorenzo makes even the most stubborn people change their mind. No one ever says no to him. 

To tell the truth, Francesco has never been that great at denying Giuliano things either, although for completely different reasons: whereas Lorenzo is peaceful and diplomatic, Giuliano is straightforward and aggressive, but there’s an almost childlike candour to his coarse frankness, to his avoidance of rhetorical curlicues, and resisting such sincerity, telling Giuliano you have no time for him, is difficult. Francesco would gladly sock him half of the time, but he still and always finds time for Giuliano.

Giuliano who’s now laughing and rushing to the bathroom to claim the right to shower first and wash away the sand, shining with all the recklessness and light-heartedness of someone who isn’t familiar with the anxiety of university exams, only with the elation of being done with high-school – one year late, sure; but after all, Giuliano approached this with a philosophical attitude, too. When his second letter of suspension got home, he had laughed and told people that his father Piero wasn’t losing hair because of a rampant baldness but because he had torn it out on account of all the meetings with the teachers and the headmaster to talk about his thug of a son, who had first knocked the student president’s teeth out and then who knows, Francesco never got it quite right. Joints were involved, a fire alarm and maybe two scantily-dressed girls, or maybe three, or maybe just one. Those incidents so typical of Giuliano where there’s no rhyme nor reason, but rest assured trouble is in the midst.

None of them speaks even a whisper of Spanish, let alone Catalan, they hardly know those three French words which are enough to quote Baudelaire and Mallarmé and make the girls’ skirts and knickers drop with dreamy sighs; but they can manage some English, and thanks to that, to some toned down Italian and to the universal hand gestures they hit the middle ground, so they come back to the flat tired and sweaty after spending an afternoon playing beach tennis with three girls they’ve met on the beach. To his amazement, Francesco has reached into the pocket of his swimsuit to fish out his cigarettes and he has found the phone number of one of them written on a scrap of paper she had slipped into his cigarette case. It’s something which usually happens to Giuliano or Lorenzo, not to Francesco who hasn’t yet figured out how he and Novella have ended up together. Giuliano has chuckled and wrestled the number away from his hands while he was still frowning. Lorenzo has just smiled and shrugged.

At that moment, Francesco has realised that he’s having a good time walking down the street in flip-flops and with a backpack over his shoulder, Giuliano joking at one side and Lorenzo laughing to his quips at the other. He’s having a really good time, even better than when he’s in Rome and his flatmates persuade him to go drinking instead of studying for the international law exam.

And then, Barcelona sparkles like a jewel made of unbelievable glass walls and marble and mosaic volutes. It’s made of colours and noises, it reminds him of Rome in some ways and of his summers in Viareggio in others, but it’s brighter and more vivid than both, and maybe Francesco almost gets the people who claim to have fallen in love with a city.

Obviously, Jacopo doesn’t know with whom Francesco has left and Guglielmo is in on the lie, otherwise there’s no way in hell he’d be in Barcelona: his uncle would’ve kicked him out and set fire to his stuff, even to their pictures together, and maybe it would have been nice to have an excuse to walk away and never come back, but Guglielmo still lives under Jacopo’s roof and Francesco can’t leave his brother behind. Hence, as long as Guglielmo lives there, Francesco isn’t going anywhere.

Giuliano re-emerges from the bathroom with a towel tied around his hips and scuffing his slippers on the floor, sand grains creaking against the tiles. His hair is still wet, and water droplets skate over his forehead and down his neck. 

He’s humming a song which Francesco _hates_ , and Giuliano knows it. He knows very well that Francesco can’t stand that particular breed of latin hip-hop and his ears bleed just from mentioning it, and that’s surely the reason why he’s singing the track by D Kay and Epsilon with a cocky grin on his face.

“ _Sometimes I feel like I’m in Barcelona, see anytime I hear this tune I start drifting away!_ ”

“I’m going to kill you.”

Giuliano laughs and leans on his knees on the bed where Francesco and Lorenzo have sprawled to read and play games on their phones. “Nope, that’s not true.”

“Yes, it is. If you try to sing that song around me ever again, I’ll kill you.”

“Lorenzo wouldn’t let you.”

Lorenzo looks up from his book feeling called into question. “In this case I might,” he admits, looking as if he’s giving serious consideration to the matter.

Giuliano pounds his fist on his chest, mouth agape. “You’d betray your only brother? The blood of your blood?”

“That song is a criminal offence.”

“That stuff you listen to is a criminal offence. A bunch of idiots who think they’re smart just because they listen to vinyls.”

“At least I listen to music legally”

“There’s little to brag about not having adjusted to the new century.”

Francesco puffs and jams his knee into Giuliano’s leg just to get him to knock it off. Giuliano grunts an exaggerated whine and shoves himself at him, his elbow pressing against Francesco’s throat.

“Acting like a dick already, Cesco?” he goads him. He says so snickering, raising his eyebrows in a sardonic sneer. He pushes his arm up against Francesco’s chin, forcing him to tilt his head backward to breathe.

“You’re being a twat already. You’re asking for it.”

Francesco tries to wiggle out but Giuliano bears down on him with a cackle. He licks his lips as he drives his knee against Francesco’s thigh, pinning him more firmly to the bed.

If he wanted to, Francesco could free himself. He could thrash around and grab Giuliano by the arms and shake him off himself. But Giuliano smells of body wash and deodorant, and the water drops are trickling down his body and falling down on Francesco’s, and all in all he doesn’t mind the feeling of fresh drops licking away his sweat and the salt, or the warm weight of Giuliano pressed against him. He doesn’t mind it at all.

Francesco hesitates, he wavers for just a split second when Lorenzo sighs and gets up saying, “Okay, I’ll go wash then,” because he’s not sure of how Lorenzo is taking it, of what he thinks of Giuliano’s hand grabbing and pulling Francesco’s hair, of how he interprets the easy manner with which Francesco bent his free leg around Giuliano’s hips.

To be honest, Francesco has boarded the plane without really knowing what to expect. He has left with just the knowledge he would spend a little longer than a week alongside the two guys with whom he regularly sleeps and who regularly sleep with him, and that both brothers perfectly know that Francesco would spread his legs for one as much as for the other. He doesn’t know whether Giuliano is fine with it. He doesn’t know whether any of the two of them really cares about him or if they are all just killing time as they wait for something else to do. Someone else, maybe.

But there’s no resentment in Lorenzo’s voice. Nor disinterest, either. It’s just the quiet acknowledgment that the shower’s free and that it’s pretty clear to him that Giuliano has no intention of letting Francesco go any time soon.

So for an instant, panic fills Francesco’s mouth with its sour taste, but it lasts as long as a heartbeat and then it dispels when Giuliano nods in assent and his mouth descends on Francesco’s, his carefree laughter still dancing on his lips. Francesco drinks from it, he catches it with his teeth. Once they get there, it takes little to let a towel and a couple of clothes drop.

Lorenzo starts the jet of water but Francesco doesn’t hear the bathroom door closing. He’s too distracted by Giuliano to check if it’s been left ajar, although he suspects it was.

⁂

Francesco hasn’t really got a clue on how to dress for a night out dancing, he’s never shown any interest in it, and tonight his black shirt and leather bracelets will probably make him stick out like the proverbial sore thumb between Giuliano and Lorenzo, who, on the contrary, have been hitting the clubs in Florence and its surroundings since they were fifteen and their parents had loosened up the reins. 

Francesco doesn’t like club music, he doesn’t like the crowd with its sweet-talk and peacock act studied to look more appealing. His definition of a crowd is rather the throng at rock concerts, where he can sing himself hoarse without Novella nudging him to stop because he can’t carry a tune and he wouldn’t hit the right note even under a death threat.

And, honestly, enough with the bullshit: guys go clubs mainly to find a girl to shag on the dancefloor or on the backseat of a car, and neither this is something Francesco cares about overly much. The first girl who has ever caught his eye was Novella; they have kissed within less than three months after meeting, and since then Francesco doesn’t even notice the others, be they girls or grown women.

The first time he’s ever been to a club happened nearly two years ago for Giuliano’s birthday and there, Francesco met Lorenzo, in the midst of the racket of the music and the frantic screams of Giuliano’s friends, under the overwhelming spot lights which blurred the edges of people and things.

Considering that that time ended up with the two of them hiding behind the rows of cars in the parking lot, Francesco on his knees at Lorenzo’s feet, it makes sense that the second time he gets ready for clubbing happens in Barcelona, with Giuliano and Lorenzo dragging him along with promises of sipping beer on the beach if the music sucks too much.

They get on the green line while Giuliano and Lorenzo are still debating whether to go to _Terrrazza_ or to _City Hall_. Eventually, Francesco is the one to choose, because as soon as he hears that there’s the chance to avoid being holed up in a room with a too-low ceiling, the drunken smell of expensive perfumes and stale air suffocating them, it’s not even a question to him.

It still takes him little to get fed up and start growling anyway, because the journey to Montjuïc takes longer than he expected and, okay, the castle where the club is located is exciting, but the queue at the entrance is long and patience has never been Francesco’s most prominent virtue. Even Giuliano is calmer and more collected compared to him.

“Listen, if we go to the _Bosc de Les Fades_ tomorrow, will you stop being such a pain in the ass? We’re here now, Cesco, deal with it. As soon as we get inside, we’ll drink and forget.”

Which is not a bad idea. The closer they get to the entryway, the more the throbbing of electronic music slithers into his ears, and Francesco establishes that yes, the only way to survive the night is to down cocktails as if his liver didn’t belong to him. 

Down into his second Long Island, the music still gives him hives and the heat begins to feel slippery, damp, it sticks underneath the fabric of his clothes and it makes his skin itch. But here comes Giuliano, a glass of mojito in each hand and another one precariously held between his teeth. Francesco drinks it all at once, until the ice and the sub-brand alcohol start to kick in. They weave their way through the throng of well-dressed people, surrounded by foreign laughter and the make-up and fake eyelashes of the American and English girls, all packed in there, more tourists than Catalans, looking for pictures and memories to bring back home at the end of the summer.

They reach the open space between the bar counter and the deejay’s stage, and Francesco sighs with relief and raises his head. The lights of Barcelona are too many and too intense to actually see the stars, but just having the sky overhead instead of a ceiling puts him more at ease. The music is still awful anyway, that type of electronic music which only Giuliano actually likes and which Lorenzo is fine with as long as it lets him go out and have fun, but Francesco decides that, ultimately, he doesn’t care that much. It’s not music that fills his senses: it’s the alcohol and Lorenzo’s hands pulling him by the arms, it’s his lopsided smile and his eyes which have the same shade of blue as Giuliano’s.

Francesco follows him. He follows Lorenzo, he follows Giuliano, and he lets them carry him wherever they want, towards the middle of the crowd where people are flailing around and screaming excitedly.

It’s not that hard to shake his hips and shoulders, to try to make sense of the rhythm of the contrived music blasting from the sound system. He just needs to let loose. To forget. For one night, he can. 

A girl approaches Giuliano and he smirks at her, he draws her onto himself by her hips and they dance together, but when she brings her face close to his, with her lips appealingly parted, Giuliano pulls his head back. He runs his tongue across his teeth and tilts his head towards Francesco and Lorenzo. He rests a hand on his brother’s shoulder, leaving no further room for doubt.

The girl goggles and raises two bewildered fingers, gesticulating with a certain emphasis. Giuliano roars with laughter as he nods and he watches her slip away into the dancing crowd, he gets his mouth close to Francesco’s ear and his warm breath, so close to his skin, elicits a shiver down Francesco’s spine.

“Do you think she’s not used to picking the wrong parish?”

Francesco smirks and replies, but the music is too loud and carries his words away.

“I think she’s not used to being turned down.“

“What?”

Francesco shakes his head and he looks down smiling, an unmistakable gesture for “ _Never mind, forget it._ ”

Giuliano shrugs, unconcerned, and he puts his arm around Francesco’s waist. With the other one he finds Lorenzo, pulling him closer; he squeezes between Francesco and Lorenzo as though he needed to have them both just to himself. Giuliano’s fingers slip into the belt loops of Francesco’s jeans, they lower them by that half-inch he needs to find a patch of naked skin to stroke underneath his shirt.

Francesco tilts his head to rest his nose against Giuliano’s throat, he inhales the fresh and balsamic scent of his perfume, hears Giuliano’s snicker smoothing over his skin as if it were his own laughter. He opens his mouth and runs his tongue along the skin stretching from Giuliano’s throat to just below his ear, takes his earlobe between his lips, biting him gently. Giuliano shudders and he bucks his hips against Francesco’s thighs, he grinds against him in the same way he would if they had no clothes on.

Francesco… Francesco isn’t drunk. Not on alcohol, at least. He feels slightly vertiginous and woozy; the mixture of humid and starry air and the pressure of Giuliano’s hands in his rouse him and stupefy him at the same time. He’s extraordinarily aware of the effect that Giuliano’s breath against his throat has on him, of the line of Lorenzo’s jaw when he raises his head to the sky and laughs with his arms up in the air. It’s kind of like diving into another dimension for a split second, for as long as he needs to drag Lorenzo closer by the thin necklace he wears around his neck, the one he never takes off, the one with the pendant his grandmother had given him when he was seven.

And for a moment everything is wonderful and perfect, because this is before he and Lorenzo fight because Giuliano has slept with the girl who bullied Novella back in high-school; before Clarice, because there’s still Lucrezia now, and Lucrezia may also be in love with Lorenzo and Lorenzo surely cares about her, maybe even loves her. However, with her blinding affection and her smiles, Lucrezia will never understand that Lorenzo isn’t as perfect as he looks in the eyes of the still-too-young girl that she is.

But in the meantime the three of them are here, sweaty and dancing and drinking and having fun, and Lorenzo is just so handsome that the air of Barcelona, the stars, the heat, the smooth sensation of his arm around his shoulder, it all makes for an intoxicating combination that gets to Francesco’s head, so he takes Lorenzo’s face in his hands and kisses him in front of everyone, in the middle of the club, where he couldn’t care less if someone sees them because no one knows them here anyway, no one cares about who they are and what they’re doing. As Lorenzo’s tongue ravages his mouth, as his chapped lips chase his, Francesco feels euphoric, free. Invincible.

He lets go of Lorenzo’s mouth with a sigh, sucking his lip between his teeth until it reddens, and he steps back. He feels Giuliano’s chest against his shoulder blades, feels his hands which grab him by the belt and press him against Giuliano’s own body, crushing Francesco between him and Lorenzo.

The weather is hot, it’s boiling hot, his clothes stick to him and the music pounds in his skull. His nostrils are drunk on the smell of Lorenzo’s aftershave, of Giuliano’s shampoo, on the all-consuming feeling of their heated skin seeking his hands, of their fingers unbuttoning his shirt some more, and then one button more, two, three.

He’s not fully clear on when and how they get back to their flat, but they climb the stairs chuckling and covering each other’s mouths to muffle the drunken chatter they can’t hold back.

When they reach the bedroom, Francesco’s shirt has already been dropped somewhere, maybe on the kitchen floor, but Francesco isn’t entirely sure he was still wearing it when the three of them walked through the front door either.

He unfastens the belt from Giuliano’s hips while Lorenzo pushes down his trousers. They rather collapse on the bed than lay down together, too wrapped up in holding onto each other, in running their hands past and underneath their clothes, peeling off what little remains to cover themselves.

Despite the ensuing chaos, despite the heat of the moment, Francesco manages easily to tell apart the kisses coming from Lorenzo’s mouth, and the ones left by Giuliano’s lips which are drifting lower and lower, leaving a wet trail below his navel: Lorenzo and Giuliano each have a different way to touch him, to savour him. There are caresses and there are scratches, bites and feathery albeit still hungry kisses , and Francesco thirsts for both, he wants to mark with his nails one’s chest as much as the other’s.

The truth is that Lorenzo and Giuliano are his drug, his weakness. He can’t refuse them, he can’t choose between them. It has never even crossed his mind because, for some reason, the thought of being without one of them hurts, it breaks his heart.

Francesco unwraps a condom and kneels between Lorenzo’s legs. Lorenzo watches him with that open-mouthed smile of his, his moans and sighs escape his throat unhindered. He doesn’t even try to hold them back because there’s no point in it, there’s no need, _they can do whatever they want_. And Francesco sinks down, he takes him inside.

Giuliano waits barely long enough – close to _not_ enough – before he kisses Francesco on the taut muscles of his shoulders and he pushes himself inside of him, making him die slowly. He consumes Francesco’s neck with lips and teeth as their thrusts become faster and faster, deeper, and then things really start to get confusing, and Francesco can no longer figure out where his body ends and Lorenzo’s and Giuliano’s begin, who’s sighing whose name, to whom belong the hands that are touching him, whose moans are flooding his ears.

Everything is perfect and everything is wonderful. It’s a night captured inside a drop of rosin which will become amber, which will become a jewel embedded in his memories and a crater that will bring ruin to his heart and soul.

⁂

They forgot to draw the curtains. They had other things to worry about: the notion that the sun could rise wasn’t a problem last night. They fell asleep on the same unmade bed they used again and again, the smells of sex, perfume and sweat so intertwined they slipped underneath their skin, through their hair and along the line of their hipbones.

The sun barges in through the windows, it sheds light on the red welts of their scratches and on the bruises left by their lips, it brings out the faint shading of freckles and the pale tan lines where the skin has always been covered by a swimsuit. The sunrays aren’t so bright to assume it’s late morning, but they’re enough to hurt Francesco’s eyes as he wakes up because Giuliano’s mobile is vibrating on the nightstand and it is ringing to the beat of a song which inhabits Francesco’s worst nightmares.

_Sometimes I feel like I’m in Barcelona…_

Francesco grits his teeth and groans under his breath, “You’re shitting me.”

Were it any other occurrence, he’d let it pass. He’d hurl the phone towards Giuliano or he’d reject the call. He’d do anything but answering on a phone which is not his – a phone which belongs to the boy who yes, Francesco glances distractedly at his hip, has verily left two scratches on his tanned skin – but on this morning Francesco is tired, he’s sleepy, and he just wants this fucking shitty song to stop playing.

So he grabs the mobile, presses the button and answers with a grouchy drawl, “Hello?”

“ _Giuliano?_ ”

His stomach, his intestines and the rest of Francesco’s digestive tract immediately jump to his throat, because the voice at the other end of the phone belongs to Lucrezia Tornabuoni.

Had it been Bianca the one to call, it would’ve been fine. Bianca… maybe she doesn’t _know_ , but she has a hunch. She isn’t dumb. And she doesn’t care. As far as she’s concerned, her brothers could even be drag queens in their spare time, as long as no one bothers her or tells her what to do.

Had it been Bianca then, Francesco would be fine, truly.

Had it been anyone else, even Giuliano and Lorenzo’s father, Francesco would breathe easier, partly because Piero Medici has never struck him as the most brilliant man ever – Francesco won’t ever say this in front of Giuliano and Lorenzo because it would be the fastest way to come to blows with both – but no. It’s their _mother_ on the phone, and that woman is a fucking weasel.

Francesco swallows with difficulty.

“No, ma’am. I’m…”

“ _Francesco?_ ”

“Yes.”

“ _Ah._ ”

“Yeah.”

He can almost hear Lucrezia thinking in her beautiful mansion in Florence as he keeps the phone pressed to his ear. Francesco checks the clock and sure, the woman is certainly wondering why at eight in the morning Francesco is close enough to her son’s mobile to answer in his stead – who the fuck is familiar enough with someone to answer to their phone? No one, since no one is such a fuckwit – because there’s no way Lucrezia doesn’t know that Giuliano sleeps with his phone tucked under the pillow. Even Francesco knows that, surely his mother does too. And now Lucrezia is connecting the dots as only she can do, and Francesco is getting very paranoid very quickly.

“Uhm, should I call your son? Giuliano is still sleeping but I can wake him up if you prefer.”

Francesco would gladly shoot himself in the head. He can’t think of one single thing to say which won’t screw him.

“ _No, don’t worry. I’d rather you put Lorenzo on the phone._ ”

“Uhm… sure.”

In the meantime Lorenzo has woken up, at least he has, but he gawks at him and he starts shaking his head and flailing his hands to signal that _no, no, no, I’m not here, I’m out, no!_

Francesco takes a deep breath and he mentally calculates how deep the grave he wants to bury himself in is.

“I meant, no, Lorenzo went out. Perhaps you might want to call him on his number, or I can tell him to call you as soon as he gets back.”

“ _Lorenzo’s out? This early?_ ”

He’s got a curse right at the tip of his tongue, straining to get out, but Francesco shoves it back down his throat, albeit with some difficulty.

“Yes, but he’s just left. I don’t know, maybe he wanted to have a stroll on the beach?”

Perhaps it might help if it sounded less like a question, but Lorenzo is stuffing his hand in his mouth to prevent himself from bursting into laughter and Francesco starts wondering how Giuliano is still asleep. He’d love to kick him awake, but he’s not sure that wouldn’t dig him a deeper grave. He intends to follow with it as soon as the phone call with his mother ends.

“ _Mmh, it might be. I’ll call again later. Just one question, though: how close are you with my daughter Bianca? Do you know her well?_ ”

Francesco slaps a hand on his face and mentally swears. He’s starting to understand why Lucrezia looked for Giuliano rather than Lorenzo.

“Not much, ma’am.”

“ _Are you sure?_ ”

“Yes, ma’am, I’m sorry.”

It’s Guglielmo the one who knows Bianca, not he. Francesco doesn’t tell her that, though, because Guglielmo and he have had each other’s backs since their parents died, so he definitely has no intention of telling Lucrezia where to go inquiring about her daughter.

She clucks skeptically but doesn’t press further. “ _Alright. I’m sorry I woke you up. Mind you, I expect you boys to be careful._ ”

 _Be careful_. Francesco glares at the box of condoms left abandoned on the floor and he feels his face flaring up.

“Don’t worry, ma’am. Have a nice day.”

He hangs up and hurls the phone to Lorenzo’s chest, hoping it hurt.

“I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you both and then I’ll kill myself too.”

Lorenzo chortles and offers him a crooked grin. “It could have been worse.”

“Worse than that? Are you aware that your mother has clued into at least half of what happened last night, right? In what way could it have been worse?”

“Giuliano could have picked up. You don’t want to know what he’s capable of saying first thing in the morning. He has no filters. Our mother found out things that no parent should know just by waking him up on Sundays.”

Francesco hides his face in his hands and groans two blasphemies in a row. “I will never be able to face your mother ever again.”

Lorenzo cocks his head. He smiles placidly, shrugs as someone who doesn’t have a care in the world.

“To be honest, I think she suspected already. What with all the times Giuliano and I visited you in Rome and with Giuliano who doesn’t know how to hide these things… but don’t worry, my mother’s not easily shocked.”

“You Medicis will be my downfall.”

### 4.2 I kissed the lovely Marlena

It’s been six days and Giuliano has decided that having _Barcelona_ as a ringtone wasn’t enough – anyway, how many fucking people need to call him every day, don’t his friends have a life? Can’t they survive one week without hearing his voice? – nope: he needed to set it as his alarm tone, and setting the alarm while on holiday is already beyond any sane person, or anyone who appreciates life, as it is.

Francesco is wondering whether Giuliano intends to lead both him and his brother to suicide, or whether Giuliano himself is tired of living and so he is fuelling their murder instinct.

Whatever his reason, Lorenzo and Francesco have resolved to take action and delete the song from Giuliano’s mobile, because although Francesco is usually the one to bitch about someone else’s musical taste, now even Lorenzo is at his wits’ end and ready to rip his brother’s fingernails out one by one if he ever hears half a note of _Barcelona_.

The plan is simply to nick his phone as soon as he averts his eyes, but Giuliano seems to have guessed their schemes and doesn’t let go of his phone, not even for a moment. He carries it even to the bathroom, and when he’s in the shower he lets _Barcelona_ play at such a high volume it’s impossible to tune it out, even with the door shut and locked with one key-turn.

Eventually, Lorenzo offers to distract Giuliano long enough to allow Francesco to delete the song.

He succeeds on the next day, as the rain pours down against the window panes for the second time in less than a week and they’ve chosen to stay indoors to try to understand something from the Catalan television and whether it’s worth it or not to rent a room in Madrid to check out the capital before their time in Spain comes to an end.

They’re all three in the bedroom, and the only one wearing at least a pair of shorts is Giuliano, who had started to dress himself still half befuddled with sleep before realising that _fuck, it’s raining,_ _thievish_ _government!_ – Francesco has chuckled: it’s an expression that Giuliano has picked up just to make fun of his father Piero and over time it has accidentally stuck. Lorenzo raises an incredulous eyebrow any time he hears his brother swearing so foolishly, whereas Francesco isn’t even surprised that Giuliano ended up outfoxing himself.

Lorenzo is lying on the bed and he is still trying to grasp what the newswoman is saying about the Falange Española – or at least, Francesco believes she’s talking about that. Most times, keeping up with Italian politics gives him enough of a headache already, what he knows about foreign parties he has mainly learnt from either Lorenzo or his uncle Jacopo, two voices which sound so conflicting that thinking about them in the same sentence is almost outlandish – and Giuliano has slumped next to him, one leg akimbo over his brother’s thighs. He’s leafing through a crinkled travel guide of Spain which he bought in the first bookshop they could come across days ago, and he is listing a series of clubs which aren’t mentioned in the guide but some of his friends who had gone on a trip to the capital recommended them to him. 

“I can ask about that pub they’d found in Plaza de Chueca again. At least we’ll see something different from the usual tourist crap.”

Francesco grimaces, hesitant. “I’d rather avoid certain areas.”

“You’re stuck to thirty years ago. It’s not a drug territory anymore.”

“How would you know?”

“I told you, these girl-friends of mine have been there.”

Francesco and Lorenzo don’t even pretend to be unaware that _girl-friends_ is a euphemism for something else. At this moment, it doesn’t matter: Giuliano is theirs alone right now, he’s alone _with_ them. Everything else disappears into the blemishes below Lorenzo’s throat which carry the signature of Giuliano’s mouth, into the dark circles framing Francesco’s eyes as long as he keeps staying awake at night to listen to them while they breathe and seek him with their hands in their sleep.

The rumble of thunder makes the windowpanes tremble and Giuliano scoffs and lets the guide fall on his face, complaining because Francesco and Lorenzo don’t pay him any attention.

“All right, you go fuck yourselves. The one time I try to arrange something…”

Lorenzo diverts his attention from the TV and takes advantage of the moment when his brother can’t see him. He gestures rapidly pointing to the kitchen, where Giuliano has left his phone to recharge. Francesco nods, immediately realising that this is the perfect chance to snatch it and delete the song, although he doesn’t know how long Giuliano could forget to check on his mobile, especially if he’s still determined to look for bars to drag them to in the evening, despite having beers in the fridge and at least two very good reasons each to keep to the flat. 

Francesco looks Lorenzo in the eyes and points at Giuliano. Lorenzo smiles, that crooked grin with parted lips that’s only his and which always manages to cause Francesco a momentary daze. However, such daze turns into incredulity when Lorenzo lowers his hand to unbutton Giuliano’s trousers and his grin becomes a slow, husky laugh, “You’re right, I shouldn’t ignore you.”

The teasing in Lorenzo’s voice is so clear, so shameless, that for a moment Francesco wavers between laughing and falling forever speechless, because it’s unlike Lorenzo to be so cocky, so straightforward. Mockery and improper touches are Giuliano’s prerogative, and Lorenzo moulds over them half of his calmness and carefulness, of his gentleness.

Now though, Giuliano jolts, and Francesco notices how he tenses the muscles on his abdomen to halt his shudder.

His throat dries while Francesco watches the lazy gestures with which Lorenzo unbuttons Giuliano’s trousers and slips his hand between skin and cotton, and the book flops sideways on the pillow as Giuliano tilts his head and bites his lip, holding back a faint moan between his teeth. Lorenzo smiles, he places his mouth close to Giuliano’s ear to whisper something Francesco cannot hear, he just catches Giuliano’s satisfied reaction as he slightly arches his hips to meet his brother’s fingers while Lorenzo moves his hand lower, touches him in a way that rips a pained gasp out of Giuliano’s lips.

Lorenzo knows how to touch Giuliano. Francesco is not blind nor a fool, he’s already noticed that Lorenzo _knows_ , that he and Giuliano _recognise_ each other when the three of them are together, that they seek each other as much as they seek Francesco, and the rational part of his brain _is_ trying to remind him that the thing should worry him, it really is, but paying it any heed is difficult when the sound of their sighs arouses him and the sight of golden skin being disrobed muddles his brains.

It’s difficult because Lorenzo and Giuliano don’t judge him, they allow him to do whatever he feels like doing, and sometimes what he feels like doing is this too: watching them touch each other and kiss each other, recognise their fingers as those he brought to his mouth and which made him come the night before, and in the meantime his heart swells and blood boils in his veins and it gathers in his stomach and then lower, and suddenly the borders of the room fog up like warm window-glass washed by cold rain. Everything which is important, everything which gives more meaning to his life, lays on the bed in front of Francesco.

Lorenzo kisses Giuliano’s eyelids and he tilts his head slightly, giving Francesco a sidelong glance; and in the amused curve of his lips where a kind reproach is already resting, Francesco regains a moment of clarity. He stands up from the chair in a hurry and yet careful to avoid making any noise and giving himself away to Giuliano, and he dashes barefoot to the kitchen to snatch his phone.

He could simply delete the song and walk back to the bedroom, but he and Lorenzo have agreed to be classier than that and that their revenge must be carried out in stages. So, in addition to deleting Giuliano’s hellish ringtone, he replaces it with _Barcelona_ by Freddie Mercury and sets it as the dial tone. He gets rid of the alarm entirely. 

Francesco can’t remember ever being this quick at sending a file via bluetooth and setting a new ringtone.

He hasn’t taken notice of exactly where the phone was before, but who cares at this point. He drops it on the table and returns to the bedroom, where Lorenzo has already stripped Giuliano of his few clothes, and now the two of them are kneeling on the bed, Lorenzo’s hands holding Giuliano by the hips while he cautiously sinks into him. Giuliano clings to Lorenzo, his eyes shut, and vivid and heated moans spring from his parted mouth, he pleads in whispers, and in the meantime his brother keeps on murmuring in his ear and against the slope of his neckline.

Lorenzo makes eye contact with Francesco and he’s still sporting the devious and hungry smile that Francesco is learning to recognise and crave during his most primal and hidden moments. Lorenzo smiles against Giuliano’s skin, he licks his earlobe and speaks slightly louder so to be heard by Francesco too as he moves his hips and takes Giuliano one thrust at a time.

“Good, like that, feel me inside you,” he urges him, short of breath, and his hands trace pathways on Giuliano’s chest, along the taut muscles of his abdomen, and then they go back to grip his hips when Lorenzo drives himself deeper, making Giuliano gasp and moan out loud. “You’re so good at taking me, you’re so hot. Let me hear how you like it.”

Francesco feels his heart beating faster and racing a mile a minute, and all the while Lorenzo does not divert his gaze, he keeps staring at Francesco in the eyes while Giuliano arches against him and Lorenzo himself moans and his words crack under the weight of his pleasure rising.

The sound of their gasps burns on Francesco’s face and clutches his stomach, so he kneels along them on the bed, he latches his mouth on Giuliano’s parted lips and swallows his moans, he lets them pour down his throat as if they were a kind of liquor that gets him drunk fast and makes shivers run down his spine. Giuliano’s hands touch him, seek him, they grab him in need of support and Francesco offers it to him without hesitation, hungry for his sweat and the solid and fevered feeling of his muscles under his fingertips.

He moves down between Giuliano’s legs, and as he skirts past his hipbones, he meets Lorenzo’s hand. Their fingers stroke each other and intertwine for a moment, then Francesco’s attention shifts back to Giuliano and his erect sex, he slowly brushes his thumb over his tip until a violent shudder sweeps over Giuliano’s body and he nearly loses his balance, held only by the possessive embrace of Francesco and Lorenzo who won’t let him go, who would never let him fall.

Francesco brings his fingers to his mouth just long enough to wet them, he savours Giuliano’s strong taste on his fingertips and then he goes back with his hand between his thighs and brings his mouth to his face, and then down the side of his throat that isn’t already being mauled by Lorenzo’s lips and teeth.

Giuliano comes on Francesco’s belly with an exhausted moan, but he crawls down to kiss him everywhere he’s stained him as an apology. And then he dips lower, lower, until he’s compelled to pull down Francesco’s boxers in order to free him and take him in his mouth. Lorenzo still moves inside him but he slows the rhythm of his thrusts to prolong this precious moment stolen from the grey clouds as long as it is possible.

Despite Giuliano’s tongue running over him and making him groan, Francesco watches Lorenzo throwing his head back as he tries to catch his breath, to maintain his control, and Francesco knows it is all because Lorenzo wants to witness Francesco fall apart in Giuliano’s mouth and seize that moment as if it were his.

Outside, the rain is still pattering on the windows in a weary but unrelenting rhythm, and Francesco drowns his fingers into Giuliano’s hair, Lorenzo’s sated gasps joining his, and everything gets lost into specks of water raining outside and inside them. 

⁂

It’s odd, almost upsetting, how easily Francesco has got used to sleeping in a narrow bed with Lorenzo and Giuliano. He’s one of those people who always fidget in their sleep: when he was little, he used to toss and turn so much that he would wake up with his bum on the floor more than once, at least until his aunt Maddalena resolved to buy him a bigger bed and set it against the wall. Francesco had fallen off it a couple more times, it still happens to this day when he’s in the throes of nightmares, but most of the time it’s an easy trick that works.

He manages to sleep quietly only when he’s with Novella. She caresses his back and she falls asleep with her cheek against his shoulder and her arm around his waist, and Francesco sleeps like a log, he almost doesn’t hear the alarm.

At the beginning of this holiday, Francesco had already thought about claiming the second double bed in the flat, the one they have never actually used if not for dumping clothes and backpacks. Because, apparently, sleeping with Lorenzo and Giuliano soothes him, and it’s not even a matter of being too tired or exhausted to toss in his sleep because for nine nights in a row he has dreamt of things which didn’t scare him and sometimes he even remembers them in the morning, and the sound of Giuliano rolling over the sheets is enough to wake him.

Francesco has always been an even lighter sleeper when he’s not in his own bedroom, so his slumber delicately fades away as he senses a warm hand caressing him along his arm and drawing circles on his stomach.

He opens his eyes slowly and barely discerns the silhouette of Giuliano who’s still sleeping in front of him. He listens to the heavy sound of his breathing: not loud enough to describe it as snoring but slightly noisier than Lorenzo’s light breath – Lorenzo who’s awake, because he’s the one touching Francesco, stroking him softly. 

Francesco sighs and stretches against him. He shivers as he becomes aware of Lorenzo’s erection pressing between his cheeks and it is as natural as it’s instinctive to roll his hips slightly, and Lorenzo thrusts forward to meet him. 

“Are you awake?”

“You woke me up.”

Lorenzo chuckles, vaguely guilty, “Sorry.”

Usually, Francesco doesn’t respond well to being woken up, but Lorenzo’s gentle hand on his skin is pleasant, and his hard heat has Francesco’s veins tingling, and it rouses him at every little wave their hips draw almost unconsciously.

“It’s fine, I’ll sleep on the plane.”

Lorenzo murmurs in agreement and his hot breath brushes Francesco’s hair. His hand fondles him sliding slightly lower, it runs down past his navel but stops just before it can reach between his legs.

“May I?”

“I’m just waiting for you to hurry up,” Francesco whispers, and Lorenzo laughs under his breath, he brings his lips to his nape and kisses him softly, he opens is mouth to lick at his skin as his hand runs over him. Francesco swallows a moan with his eyes shut, he arches his back against Lorenzo’s chest but he doesn’t get the chance to bite his lips and hold back a hoarser gasp when Lorenzo’s warm palm cups his balls.

“Hush,” Lorenzo breathes in his ear, squeezing him a bit and causing him one more broken groan. “Let’s not wake Giuliano up.”

Francesco sighs an attempt of assent which gets lost in the flick of Lorenzo’s wrist and in the humid brush of his tongue lapping at his throat, in the scraping of Lorenzo’s teeth that bite him gently where his heartbeat is making his veins pulse. 

Francesco surrenders himself fully to Lorenzo’s hands and body, he shuts his lips to bite down every moan and his muscles tense and relax to follow Lorenzo’s slow pace as he grinds against him.

Francesco breathes in, and his voice trembles when he makes fun of Lorenzo, “I bet you regret having packed already, don’t you?”

Lorenzo pants, he sinks his teeth in Francesco’s shoulder to muffle down his own laughter. It almost hurts, but Francesco likes it and, anyway, it surely won’t be enough to leave a sign. Lorenzo’s marks are never visible to the naked eye, they always remain buried much deeper, where life can’t see them. 

“I’m definitely thinking about a thing or two that would be useful now, it’s true.” Lorenzo kisses him on his throat again and then he whispers, “Open your legs, Francesco.”

And Francesco trusts him, he does as he is told. Lorenzo stops touching him but Francesco senses him moving behind him and bringing his palm to his mouth, and then he feels the moistness of saliva as Lorenzo wets Francesco’s thighs before slipping between them.

“Now close them, try to keep me like this.”

It’s a slower, more languid balance than what Francesco is used to, there are no energetic thrusts nor fingernails scratching to hold their grip, but Lorenzo’s hot erection sliding between his thighs is stirring another kind of fire, it arouses him along with Lorenzo’s hand and it evokes another type of hunger. Lorenzo’s hoarse gasps pound in his ears, they snatch the last free recesses of his brain. Francesco drives back an arm to pull Lorenzo closer against him, he glues his own back to his chest until there’s not even a hairsbreadth of air parting them, and he feels Lorenzo’s golden pendant and its chain jammed against his shoulders’ muscles, grazing against his heated skin.

Outside, the sky is painted dark, of that inky and dusty colour it always acquires just before dawn, and Francesco closes his eyes, he clings onto that hem of night behind his eyelids so he can pretend there is no end to their time on this bed, to the fierce embrace of their bodies pressed close together.

Francesco turns and sinks his face into the pillow to smother his moan as he comes spilling on the bedsheets and on Lorenzo’s hand. He fights his own languor and clamps his thighs together, he keeps Lorenzo squeezed against himself and in the meantime he dares to turn his head and open his eyes: the first glimmers of light are tainting the dark and the white walls of the room. Giuliano is still facing him, but he’s not sleeping. He’s awake and smiling at him.

Lorenzo murmurs and hastens his thrusts, he comes between Francesco’s legs at the same time as Giuliano leans forward and his tongue seeks Francesco’s, while his arm slides past his waist to find his brother’s back with his hands.

They sigh in the noiseless void left by a city that is still asleep, the sunrays are edging forward with small steps and rest their blurry fingertips past the window.

Giuliano listens, he waits for Francesco’s breathing to slow down, his fingers linger on his throat to check his heartbeat.

“Let’s go and have our last swim,” he suggests, a flavour of salt and stars on his smile. 

Francesco grunts and tries to hide his face in the pillow again. “The swimsuits are packed.”

Giuliano laughs, “Who said we need a swimsuit?”

At that moment, Francesco lacks the promptness of mind to tell him to fuck off, and what is worse is that now Lorenzo is also laughing, so there’s no chance of objection anymore. Perhaps he lost it as soon as Giuliano opened his mouth.

He treks down to the beach barefoot and wearing only his boxers, Lorenzo and Giuliano are enveloped in the sheet which draped the bed and they laugh as they tug at each other yanking its ends.

Halfway there, Giuliano lets go of it and starts running naked towards the sea. He yells enthusiastically and dives into the waves driven by the wind, and then even Lorenzo follows on his heels and Francesco has no choice but to hurriedly slip out of his underwear and run after them.

The sea is warm, almost too warm, whereas the air is chilly and the waves seem to drive them towards each other. Water is dripping from Francesco’s hair and onto his lashes, he watches Giuliano splashing Lorenzo and he recalls the rain, the hidden and solitary squares of this city lively with glass and mosaics, the kisses they gave in front of everybody and without fear of anyone because there’s nothing to be afraid of here.

Lorenzo shouts Giuliano’s name and turns towards Francesco, his eyes drowning in laughter. And thus, Francesco realises the blue in Lorenzo and Giuliano’s eyes is the same shade painting the sky above Dublin, boundless and amazing, when he’d travelled there with Guglielmo to celebrate his eighteenth birthday. It’s that colour, that deep and unfathomable blue that softens into a lighter and voracious azure: Giuliano and Lorenzo’s eyes gleam as if there were a shining sun instead of their pupils, something which blinds you as soon as you dare to stare at it for too long.

The sky reflects in the sea where they’re floating, and that same sea is blending into waves and re-emerges into eyes where Francesco – he realises now with sharp clarity – lost a piece of himself long before this trip.

⁂

When he’s back home, the first time Novella lies down on his bed, Francesco hesitates for a moment before taking off his t-shirt. He knows there are still marks engraved in his skin, scratches and bites which are the undeniable trophy of the moments he spent in the throes of passion, kissing mouths that weren’t his girlfriend’s.

For a second, he’s even tempted to shuck just his jeans and his pants and leave his shirt on, but that would be an admission of guilt and Francesco, as much as he tries to, doesn’t feel guilty at all.

In the end, it’s Novella who slips her fingers underneath the hem of his t-shirt and lifts it up slowly. Francesco raises his arms and surrenders to her, Novella takes the garment off and lets it drop on the bed with distracted gentleness.

Her gaze lingers on the bruise crowning his chest, right where his heart beats, the purple evidence left where Giuliano ruptured his skin. Novella brushes it with the end of her fingertips, as if it were a pencil drawing she’s afraid of smearing but it captivates her at the same time.

“Well, I expected worse, considering what my friends tell me about Giuliano. Or is this Lorenzo’s?”

Francesco has barely the courage to look her in the eye, but thankfully he does, because it lets him see how there is no disappointment in Novella’s eyes, and neither anger nor scorn. He reads only understanding in her gaze. And curiosity, maybe, even though he doesn’t know how to react to this one.

Francesco shakes his head. “No, Lorenzo doesn’t leave any mark.”

Novella frowns. She runs her hands on Francesco’s shoulders, kneads them.

“You shouldn’t be afraid of telling him what you like.”

It’s not really a reproach, but Francesco feels compelled to retort, to defend himself, anyway.

“I’m not afraid.”

“Okay,” Novella nods with a smile. She bites his earlobe, kisses him on his lips. She takes it slowly, open-mouthed, she seeks Francesco’s tongue and savours him unhurriedly. “You shouldn’t have issues at asking for things, you know? You deserve to feel good too. Do you think the three of us will get you to see that?”

Novella jests and smiles, but Francesco stiffens.

“It’s not like that. I belong with you.”

She sighs in an exasperated manner. The hands which were resting on his shoulders shift to caress his head, to sink into his hair.

“You wouldn’t have slept with them if you didn’t care about them. It’s not what you do.”

“I belong with you,” Francesco repeats, emphasizing each word, and that wouldn’t mean panic is rising within him because no, being scared by a few words would be stupid, wouldn’t it? However, he is unsettled now, and Novella notices that, so her gentle hands shift again and stroke his face with that caring and lazy touch of hers she only uses when she is worried about him.

“Alright, I know. But it’s just you and I, Fra, there’s no need to hide,” she whispers, and what should have been a meeting, held in hushed voices to avoid disturbing Guglielmo who is studying in the next room, becomes a warm and unclothed embrace. Novella pushes him to sit on his heels and she bends her legs around his hips, her whole body drawing him tight to herself.

“You know I’ll always stand by you, don’t you? No matter what you do, or whom you love.”

“But I love you,” Francesco reiterates. Almost as if he were trying to justify himself, like a broken record which is stuck on those three millimetres of vinyl and can’t move ahead, and it keeps on wedging in and it irreversibly scores.

A growl is about to surge from his diaphragm, that kind of anger which is his usual response to everything, but he doesn’t want to resort to it with Novella. He can’t do it with her who has heard enough yelling at home, and Francesco has promised her that will never happen as long as they are together. “I love _you_.”

“You can love many people, Fra. There’s room for everyone, if we want to.”

And Francesco is unable to speak any further. He kisses her and lays her down on the bed and they end up making love instead of laughing and tangling and chasing pleasure like they usually do. They touch each other with such devotion and trust it makes them feel indestructible and greater than the world, safe from everything and everyone till their skin kisses other skin and breeds heat.

It’s not that different from what Francesco felt on the first night with Giuliano and Lorenzo pressed against him, from what he felt on their last night too and later naked in the sea, and then, yes, that is the moment when he discovers he is actually afraid.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song inhabiting Francesco and Lorenzo's worst nightmares is, as mentioned, [_Barcelona_](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0m9zxSc01A) by D Kay & Epsilon  
>   
> The _Bosc de Les Fades_ is one of the most famous pubs in the city and its interior is decorated to resemble a fantasy forest.  
>   
> "Picking the wrong parish" - it: _"sbagliare parrocchia"_ \- is a regional jargon for sexual orientation.  
> "Fuck, it’s raining, thievish government!"- it: _"piove, governo ladro!"_ \- is a typically Italian expression born as a parody of the slogans against the government.  
>   
> I'll bake you virtual cakes if you reblog the [promo on Tumblr](https://ueberdemnebelmeer.tumblr.com/post/186709707898)! :)


	5. Marlena, win the night (undress it all, show your beauty to these folks)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _And even when I’m sick and I’m too tired_   
>  _Like fire I will step forward to take everything_   
>  _Which awaits and be ready to face the pack_   
>  _I don’t want to go back, now I set off_   
>    
>  **In which things and people are called by their name and Francesco discovers new details in the silence.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title and excerpt in the summary from [_Morirò da re_](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iywXK9Dj2o4) by Måneskin  
>   
> CHAPTER DETAILS  
>  **rating:** M  
>  **pairings:** Giuliano/Lorenzo/Francesco, Giuliano/Francesco, Giuliano/Lorenzo, Lorenzo/Clarice  
>  **tags:** Bar Room Brawl, Sibling Incest, Infidelity, Established Relationship, Polyamory

  
  
  
  


Moodboard crossposted from [Tumblr](https://ueberdemnebelmeer.tumblr.com/post/190668157903)

* * *

### 5.1 Let us shine in this grey night

The flat seems emptier without Novella, which is weird because Francesco has moved there years after they had broken up, after she had left for Scotland, and one of the things Francesco has always loved about his apartment is the feeling of respite he gets when crossing the threshold, when he closes the door and shuts the world outside.

His home is the place where nothing exists besides Francesco himself. It’s his space, his shelter. He has filled it with prints of his favourite films, with books he has slowly collected since he was a teenager. He has even allotted a shelf specifically to Corto Maltese, and next to it he has hung the guitar he bought for himself after his first year of work. He had never had the courage to bring it out while he lived under his uncle’s roof. For a long time, he had kept it hidden in the boot of Guglielmo’s car first and then in his own, because Jacopo’s reactions and outbursts were always unpredictable and Francesco had no wish to take any chances.

He used to play it only in car parks in the company of those couples of co-workers who weren’t completely in his uncle’s thrall, a cigarette dangling between his lips while he picked the right song. He brought it out again during the nights when he met with his old university mates and Andrea asked him if he still remembered how he had taught Francesco how to play _Wonderwall_ the night before an exam.

Now, he can afford to keep it in plain sight and fiddle with it any time he cannot sleep.

This flat has always suited Francesco, and yet now it seems too large for one person alone. It feels cold, empty. Novella has taken away the background of folk music which plays from her mobile while she showers and not even the scent of Giuliano’s aftershave is here, nor Lorenzo’s voice asking him for the umpteenth time where Francesco has put the coffee and why he cannot keep it in the same place like all Christians do – “ _Because the only Christian spending time in this house is you, Lorenzo. Come on, quit being a pain in the ass._ ”

Perhaps the constants in Francesco’s life have changed too much during this last year, and suddenly his house makes him feel uncomfortable, as though it were a garment too loose to actually fit. It’s not tailored to him anymore. It lacks sounds to keep it alive, to make it seem like a home and not just a place where he exists. It’s too quiet, too lifeless.

Francesco isn’t fond of silence: his mother had her own unique way of crying, hiding her face in her hands and biting her fingers to stifle any sound. She always cried when dad drove her to the hospital to undergo her therapies. Aunt Maddalena started to speak less and less after each miscarriage, she took a vow of silence in the convent where she shut herself in before killing herself on a silent morning. Jacopo always quieted down, even halted his breathing, before he started shouting and hurling stuff, before he raised his hands.

To be honest, Francesco despises silence, and the problem is that now his home is silent. Switching the stereo on would be akin to sticking a patch over a too large and still-bleeding wound, so he pockets his wallet and his cigarettes, and closes the door behind him as he rings Giuliano to ask him whether he is still out. There is no point in trying to reach either Lorenzo or Guglielmo at this hour: they must be tucking in their children or tying up loose ends at home, checking on those things which have gathered dust during the week, side-lined by work demands.

Giuliano and Francesco are always the only ones who listen to the silence and can’t sleep.

Giuliano picks up on the first ring as if he already knew that Francesco would seek him out, that there are two of them being restless tonight.

He is out with some friends, he says. People whom Francesco has seen in passing when they were in high school and their cliques often mingled. People who probably remember Francesco more than he does about them.

He is almost inclined to give up, to sit on his deck and try to string together a couple of chords which should sound like _Il Vecchio e il Bambino_ even though Lorenzo is not there to sing along in Francesco’s stead. However, he detects a heavy stridency in Giuliano’s voice, a sour note which has become rarer since the first time they went to Arezzo – and then there has been a second one too – but which hasn’t disappeared yet.

After all, he is already outside with his car keys in his hand. He might as well go out and wash away the bitter taste in his mouth with a beer and some inconsequential chatter.

⁂

Francesco needs only to reach the front of the pub where Giuliano and the others should be to realise something is wrong: there is a handful of people clustered a few metres from the doorway and the pitch is too animated to be a mere gathering between friends.

Francesco approaches them cautiously, ready to dodge the squabblers and squeeze into the pub to look for Giuliano, but Giuliano is right there amidst the havoc and next to him there is his friend, the photographer, gripping him by the arm.

“ _Giuliano, drop it, they can only talk,_ ” Francesco hears him say, but Giuliano isn’t listening to him and he advances towards a man with a green jacket and a hat lowered on his forehead.

“Shut your fucking mouth before I knock your teeth out,” he growls.

The stranger inflates his chest. “I’m not scared by a yapping son of thieves!”

The man’s friends laugh behind him. They pat him on the back. “ _You tell him, Nello!_ ”

Francesco bumps shoulders to make his way just to hear the slurring voice profess, “We all know your father used to cash in bribes and that pansy brother of yours does it too for sure!”

Francesco stiffens. He has the clear perception of the moment when his brain shuts down and the only thing he can sense is the blood seething in his veins.

The photographer and two other guys bounce on Giuliano to lock his arms but they are oblivious to the person they should actually restrain, so Francesco grabs the bloke by the collar of his shirt. He tugs so hard he feels the two-bit cotton tearing under his fingers.

“What did you say about his brother?”

The man frowns in disgust and clutches Francesco by his wrists to drive his hands away from his neck while one of his friends braces himself with his fists up on guard.

“Man, what d’you want from me?”

The stranger’s breath smells of wine and grappa. His eyes are watery and his cheeks flushed. He is just a fucking drunkard, someone who is probably mad at the Medicis because they have more money than him and all his friends combined or because he has asked them about some tricks to evade taxes and they refused him. Francesco doesn’t care, though: the man has brought Lorenzo into this so that’s on him, drunk or not.

“Eat your words back or I’ll make you swallow them.”

Francesco senses someone moving behind him, he hears Giuliano’s disdainful and amused laughter and the voices of those friends of his who are trying to keep him out of trouble – _Sandro_ , the photographer’s name is _Sandro_. He is the one who used to portray Simonetta, the one whom Clarice decided to protect while the others were trying to save Giuliano from himself.

“ _Guys, let’s call it a night. It’s not worth it_ ,” and “ _Lorenzo wouldn’t approve…_ ”

Yeah, well, Lorenzo is not here now, is he.

“Go kiss some Medici asses if you’re their friend,” the man says, and he spits in Francesco’s face.

He spits in his face.

Francesco doesn’t think: he lifts his knee and hits with all his strength. The man slumps down and Francesco knees him again in his stomach, knocking him to the ground.

The guy beside him throws himself at Francesco but Giuliano puts himself between them. He takes the punch meant for Francesco and counters it with just as much violence, as if he didn’t even notice the blow.

Francesco has barely the time to wipe away the bloke’s spit from his cheek that another thug charges at him.

He crashes against one of the wooden tables outside the pub, landing on one of Giuliano’s friends. They pick themselves up together, one hand on the back of the other, just in time to grab Giuliano before he crumbles to the ground under the kicks of the first bloke who has got back on his feet in the meantime. 

It’s a mess. There is adrenaline pumping and rage roaring, instinct driving in before the brain can, and the shouts of Giuliano’s friends yelling at them to stop and goading them at the same time. Punches fly, Francesco’s knuckles sting after he scrapes on someone’s teeth, but he keeps on hitting, shoulder to shoulder with Giuliano and the other blonde guy – Roberto? Riccardo? Francesco is not sure.

A hook straight to his stomach tears his breath out, but it surely hurts less than a broken rib, so Francesco keeps on thrashing with his feet too until three out of the four men are down. 

Only the coward one has been left out, the only one who hasn’t even attempted to join the brawl, and Giuliano is about to pounce on him too if it weren’t for the blond guy holding him back. Someone – Sandro – takes care of restraining Francesco by the arms, heedless of the risk of his own face getting elbowed.

The first man, that son of a bitch who thought he could disparage Lorenzo in front of them, is pressing his hand on his swollen face and he spits a glob of blood and saliva as he tries to get back on his feet.

“I’m reporting y’all!”

Francesco laughs. His stomach hurts like hell but he laughs anyway because, really, this calls for a laugh.

“Do it if you dare! I bet a year of your salary isn’t enough to buy half of one of my lawyers. Do you want the shit beaten out of you in court too?” 

The fourth man – the coward – attempts to come forth while the others scramble to get up.

“No. No, listen, I’m taking them away now and no one’s gonna press charges on anyone.”

Francesco rubs his hand over his scraped fist. “Are you trying to give me orders? Do you want to see how this works out for you too?”

“We’ve all drunk too much, things have been said that no one meant. Let it slide this one time and we put an end to it right now, uh? You have no desire to call the carabinieri either, do you? We’d be here ‘till morning for how these things usually go.”

“And you know a great deal about how they go, don’t you?”

Giuliano grunts a noise that sounds almost like a choked laugh and he dries off the blood dripping from his nose with his shirtsleeve. The blond guy, the one who is still standing beside Giuliano and is resting his hand on his shoulder to stop him if the need arises, frowns.

“How about your friend apologises for what he said, first, and _then_ we let it slide.”

Sandro inhales hard and calls him apprehensively, “ _Roberto, no,_ ”, but Roberto scowls and stares at the three men who are now standing again. His lip is cracked and bleeding – unlike Francesco, he didn’t manage to avoid the blows to his face – but his mouth is a straight line of resolution and still-seething, loyal fury.

“So?”

Francesco wonders what Lorenzo would say if he knew how many are ready to throw hands to defend his honour.

He’d probably blanch and try to explain to them for the umpteenth time that violence never solved anything.

“Alright, alright! We’re sorry.”

Giuliano shakes his head. “No, not you: he,” he hisses with gritted teeth and points his scratched finger to the man who spat in Francesco’s face, the one who insulted Lorenzo.

The apologies come with a coward and unsatisfying snivelling which makes Francesco’s hands itch, and the only thing preventing him from kick-starting the fight again and allowing the man to let go is the monotonously-repeated thought that it’s not worth it. That, at this point, reigniting the fight would be a greater offense to Lorenzo than the vile slanders of these strangers.

Not all the people who have bones to pick with the Medicis are like Jacopo. Not all the men who give in to violence are as dangerous as his uncle used to be. Francesco recites it in his head again and again and he counts to five, to ten, to twenty.

His stomach hurts. His hands hurt.

Giuliano sniffles and whines. He cups his fingers against his face and he swears through his teeth. Francesco bites the inside of his cheek and examines him, as much as his grazed, blood-stained fingers allow him to see.

“Broken?”

“No. It just hurts like a bitch.”

“You sure?”

Giuliano gives him the stink-eye and snaps, “I remember what a broken nose feels like.”

Yes, he is likely to remember that. On his part, Francesco hasn’t forgotten the crude and vicious feeling of the bone cracking under his knuckles either, nor the slick sound of blood gurgling as Giuliano struggled to breathe through his mouth.

He runs a hand on his face even though his fingers sting and smart because of the bruises. He tries to sweep away the mental image which still grates on his conscience.

“Come on, let’s go. I’m bringing you home.”

Sandro and Roberto turn pale. “Lorenzo can’t see him like this.”

Francesco looks at Giuliano, who smiles at Francesco despite his mouth being still moist with blood, his hand on his nose to stem the dull throb of pain.

Giuliano’s wan face should be a frightful sight in the state it's been reduced, with his lips and his cheekbone already swelling; yet his wild eyes are sparkling with a complicated, naked emotion, and it kindles a moment of complicity between them, it blots all the other people out. It’s a spark that assures Francesco that Giuliano has already figured out that his _going home_ doesn’t mean Villa Medici in all his imposing splendour of grand windows and restored arches, but rather his last-floor apartment where Francesco is positive he has forgotten a couple of lights on.

Giuliano fishes something from the pocket of his jeans and he tosses it to another friend of his whom Francesco didn’t recognise earlier.

“Guido, I entrust you with my bike. I’ll come to your place to pick it up tomorrow evening.”

The guy dangles the keys of the Ducati and he offers Giuliano a wry smile. “If I scratch it, I’m going to repaint it with my blood, right?”

“Glad you got the picture.”

Guido snickers, Sandro rolls his eyes and sighs. Giuliano tries to laugh too but he stops soon, whining another curse, and Francesco slides his arm around his shoulder while he’s still telling disparate entities to go fuck themselves.

“Be less of a brat. You said it isn’t broken.”

“I’ve changed my mind. It’s broken, so shut up and let me complain.”

Francesco shakes his head. Now that the adrenaline from the brawl is diluting into his head and breath, weariness inches closer in iron-clad strides.

“Come on, you need to clean up.”

He tries not to feel embarrassed as he says goodbye to people about whom he knew very little from the start and whom he has now seen years later only for the time of a punch-up, without even managing to revise all their names before leaving with Giuliano propped on his shoulder.

“Remind him to give me a heads up when you arrive,” Sandro says worriedly, but Giuliano scoffs before Francesco can even raise an eyebrow in amusement.

“Give you a heads up on what? I’m over thirty and you’re not my mother.”

Sandro folds his arms in a pose which might actually be genuine, yet Francesco finds it rather a conscious impression of Mrs Tornabuoni and her willful scowl.

“Be grateful I’m not ‘cause this is not how you introduce your boyfriend to the family.”

Francesco doesn’t need a mirror to know he has blanched. His heart freezes in his chest and his spine congeals in a straight and unbending line.

His arm is still around Giuliano’s shoulders. He put it there even though it’s unnecessary, even though Giuliano can stand on his own just fine. He did it because it is a matter of habit, an instinctive pull, having Giuliano close to him and stretching a hand or a leg to find some body contact.

Until this instant, Francesco had never noticed how normal it has become for him to look for Giuliano within his arms, how the thought of avoiding certain touches in public hasn’t even crossed his mind because his only rationale is that when his fingertips can rest on the skin of those he loves, then everything feels a little nicer, a little lighter.

Francesco is not sure of what is about to happen until he notices that Giuliano’s body is still relaxed and resting against him. He hasn’t pulled away, he hasn’t stiffened, Sandro’s words haven’t upset him.

His friends laugh only when Giuliano gives them the middle finger but nothing else happens and, most importantly, nothing is denied.

Because Francesco said “ _home_ ” and they both thought of the same large bed with the badly ironed sheets.

“Francesco already is family anyway.”

⁂

Francesco puts out his cigarette and watches the last ripple of smoke dilute into the air and slither out of the window he left ajar. Down in the street, the noise of the first morning traffic is starting to notch up and shape another workday similar to all others. The unoriginal buzz reaches Francesco as far and muffled, it sounds like truths distractedly confessed, just a white backdrop for the more peaceful noise of Giuliano breathing slowly as he sleeps with his face sunken into the pillow.

Francesco rearranges the blankets for him to cover his naked shoulders. He runs a hand over his own stomach, where his skin has darkened into a bluish bruise under his soft t-shirt. Last night, as they washed away the blood with hydrogen peroxide and some gauzes Francesco has had in his drawers for who knows how many years, Giuliano spotted dusky and angry streaks on Francesco’s back too, right where he had crashed into the table.

He got lucky, anyway. At least his face has come out unscathed. On the contrary, Giuliano’s nose is purple all down under his eyes and one of his cheekbones has swollen and is mottled in greens and yellows despite the ice that Francesco applied right after the disinfectant.

They threw immediately the shirt into the washing machine, but it was light-coloured so neither of them believes they will succeed in removing the blood stains. It will probably end up in the trash can alongside the gauzes with which they wiped themselves.

Francesco has already texted the bank’s chat group to let them know he has to take a sick day and then he has switched off his mobile to avoid being bothered by the useless rigmarole of get-well wishes.

Perhaps his colleagues truly care about whether he is okay or not, but all those “ _get well_ ” and “ _call if you need anything_ ” have always sounded vapid to him, guided by an anonymous sense of politeness.

Giuliano murmurs in his sleep and tosses beneath the sheets. He stretches a hand out and brushes Francesco’s warm thigh with his fingers, he tries to cling to him with blunt fingernails. Francesco rests his own hand over his and gently lays back on the bed, his eyelids heavy and wishing to sleep a couple of hours more before he has to get up and surrender to the lure of the coffee machine.

He barely manages to drift off to a paltry doze before the buzz of the doorbell pierces his eardrums insistently.

Giuliano groans and buries his head under the pillow.

“I don’t know who it is but tell them to go away.”

“Why don’t you do it?”

“Thine’s the house, thine’s the honour.”

The doorbell keeps on ringing furiously. They have no idea who is the stubborn fucker who has glued his finger to the buzzer, but Francesco is thinking horrible thoughts about this moron’s mother and the night she saw fit to spread her legs.

Giuliano grunts a more heart-felt blasphemy than all the others and he presses the pillow down against his ears, holing up under the sheets as if they were a cocoon and hell-bent on not abandoning the warm bolthole of Francesco’s bed.

Eventually, Francesco forces himself to get up and answer the intercom. He grabs the receiver and brings it to his ear as he leans his forehead on the wall.

“Hello?”

He chews the “ _who the fuck are you and what the fuck do you want_ ” and swallows it down together with very specifics insults addressed to the woman who got knocked up instead of watching a documentary on world overpopulation.

“Francesco? Francesco, I don’t know where Giuliano has gone. He didn’t come home last night and he is not answering his phone.”

_Uh_. So the mother Francesco has insulted for the last five minutes is the same one who gave birth to the very man in his bed.

Francesco sighs and runs a hand over his face.

“Don’t worry, Lorenzo. He’s here.”

“Is he alright? Why isn’t he answering his phone?”

“Might be that the battery’s dead.”

Francesco bashes his head lightly against the wall and ponders over what to do. On one hand, he knows Lorenzo won’t put his heart at ease until he sees Giuliano and makes sure his brother is alive and kicking. On the other, it is true that Giuliano is fine, but his face tells a whole different story and Francesco isn’t sure how Lorenzo might react when confronted with this snippet of a film. Badly for sure. Worse, more probably.

“Come on up, at least you can help me rousting him out of the bed.”

There is a moment of pause in which Francesco can almost _see_ Lorenzo closing his eyes to stem his tears of relief.

“ _Thank you._ ”

Since he has known him, Lorenzo has always been protective of his younger brother, but after the accident he has gone off the deep end, went paranoid. Losing sight of Giuliano sends Lorenzo into panic, as if he were afraid that his brother could disappear for good as soon as he lets his guard down.

Francesco hangs up and allows himself one last sigh before going back to the bedroom and take off the blankets from Giuliano.

“Get up, Lorenzo’s here.”

Giuliano tries to grab the sheets and hide beneath them. “Are you idiotic? Do you know how much shit he’s going to give us when he sees the state we’re in?”

Francesco plants his feet and tugs at the sheets while Giuliano holds them with equal stubborness. They are probably about to tear them.

“You’re the one with a messed up face, not I.”

“Yeah, because I took half of the punches they aimed at you.”

“Bullshit. Come on, get up now,” Francesco repeats impatiently.

“Has Novella ever told you you’re a shit boyfriend? Because you’re really such a shit.”

“If you have a problem with it, you can always break up with me.”

Francesco means to say it with indifference, as if it were a joke. In fact, he loses his grip on the sheets as soon as the words slip out of his mouth and his voice cracks halfway through, his last syllable crumbles.

Giuliano notices. He takes advantage of Francesco’s momentary lapse to get the blankets all for himself and then he rolls on his side, turning his shoulders to Francesco.

However, before he curls up on himself, Giuliano whispers, “With all the time it took us to find each other again? You must mistake me for a fool.”

When Lorenzo gets to the door, Francesco is still standing there shell-shocked, looking at Giuliano’s back. 

### 5.2 And next to thee I’ll die as a king

It looks like Clarice has just returned home. She is not wearing her coat, but her black leather bag is still open and propped absently on the coffee table of the small living room by the entrance. She is holding her three-month-old daughter to her chest and she lets her toy with her loose hair as she smiles at her.

She turns towards them the moment she hears them coming inside the house – Francesco just a step behind Lorenzo and Giuliano – and she gapes at the sight of her brother-in-law.

“Good grief, Giuliano! What happened to you?”

Giuliano extends her a smug grin which actually has no place on that face repainted by a nameless drunkard.

“I defended my brother’s honour. And now I’m going to bed because being the family’s white knight is an exhausting business.”

Clarice raises a gobsmacked eyebrow and she puckers her lips, holding back a sigh of dismay. She looks at Lorenzo for a better explanation, but he shakes his head defeatedly. The rage which has exploded earlier at the sight of Giuliano’s bruised skin is long gone, and all that is left is the anguish in Lorenzo’s eyes.

Francesco stands still and observes them. He watches Lorenzo as his arms slump against his sides before he reaches his wife to kiss her and their daughter.

Francesco wishes that this picture – so innocent, so simple – would make his heart ache more. He wishes he still had an ounce of pride left – like Giuliano does – that would at least have the decency to _whimper_ when Lorenzo carries himself so carelessly. Because in so doing, he reminds Francesco that he will always be beyond his and Giuliano’s grasp, always a heartbeat away because his body is still leaning towards the woman for whom they have already been set aside once, many years ago.

Who knows how long Clarice has been reassuring Lorenzo’s worries while Francesco and Giuliano weren’t there, how many things she has heard him say and how many she has figured out in-between deafening silence.

She calls Giuliano and warns him before he walks upstairs, “Be careful to stay out of your mother’s sight, she still doesn’t know you didn’t come home last night. If you leave your door open, I’ll bring you an aspirin later.”

Lorenzo scoffs, he lets a grain of rage grab him by the fingertips again. “Let him suffer. Heaven forbid he should learn to lay off these stunts.”

From the first steps of the stairs, Giuliano clamours, “What an ungrateful brother! And to think that I fought for you.”

“I don’t recall asking you.”

“There was no need.”

And just like that, Giuliano walks away. No other acknowledgement, just a stretched, sly smirk skewed by the harsh blows. 

Lorenzo looks like he is about to follow him upstairs but maybe he has heard something in his brother’s heavy steps – a sound that Francesco didn’t perceive nor recognise – which dissuades him because eventually he stays where he is, with one hand resting on Clarice’s elbow and the other caressing his daughter’s cheek.

Despite all which has passed, the three of them seem to be still destined to spend the turns of their existence at each other’s doorsteps.

Even a year and a month after the night when Francesco had put on Lorenzo’s helmet and this never-ending thing with fangs which binds them has barged back into their lives, there are still moments in which they have to tiptoe and question whether coming in is possible or if it would be fairer to allow some doors to remain closed. 

By now, Francesco has accepted this too. He has accepted everything as far as Lorenzo and Giuliano are involved, the good and the bad. But then, the bad is good for Giuliano who doesn’t know how to deal with that good, whereas with Lorenzo the bad springs from the will to do good, so although it’s not good, no one should dare to call it bad.

Ultimately, Francesco was the first to start the brawl to defend Lorenzo’s name, wasn’t he? Even though he knows – he and Giuliano both know, they who hit with the fiercest punches – that there was a sliver of truth in that coarse slander, just like he also knows that Piero Medici wasn’t always transparent with his records. That is why Lorenzo divested his father of his work desk years ago and he wrenched the reins of the business from his hands. Because Lorenzo cannot abide dishonesty, especially when it comes from his own family. Lorenzo’s mouth can keep quiet only sometimes and never lie. 

And yet, Lorenzo is not aware of all the inconvenient and venomous truths from which his loved ones constantly protect him. They are plenty, both the unspoken things and the people who are so dependent on his smile that they are willing to eat their hearts out in ravenous mouthfuls rather than harm his dazzling light.

After all, it feels like such a small price to pay to make Lorenzo happy. A daily routine made of crumbs, like the question which now springs into Francesco’s mind almost spontaneously as he hears the baby gurgling to draw Clarice’s attention.

“Can I see her?”

He has only ever caught glimpses of her, and yet Francesco already knows the baby girl to be gorgeous: she has Clarice’s elegant nose and her mouth, but her eyes are big and bright, and even though she struggles to keep them open because of her yawning, it is impossible to miss how they shine like Lorenzo’s.

Francesco hides behind a crooked smile as he avoids to utter whichever name: against all odds, Clarice has managed to have her way and name the girl Maddalena exactly as she wished, yet Lorenzo insisted on choosing Contessina as her middle name and that is how he introduces and talks about his daughter to everyone.

In his heart, Francesco also thinks of her more as Contessina rather than Maddalena. And Francesco thinks about Lorenzo’s children often, more often than he does about Guglielmo’s daughter.

Perhaps this means only that Francesco is an awful brother, but maybe it means something more, something that Francesco has already heard, whispered in the conspicuous silence of his flat last night.

Lorenzo’s face opens in such a luminous smile that it lights him up as if it were a star on the verge of turning into a supernova.

“Do you want to hold her?”

“Oh, no, I’d better not. I’ve never held a baby.”

Not even his nephew Antonio. Although, in that case, it might have been for the best, because once Francesco touches things, he can’t let go of them anymore, and little Antonio’s eyes had closed forever too soon.

Francesco is afraid of fragile things.

Clarice smiles cordially at him. She approaches Francesco with a confident gait and she stretches her arms towards him. She holds out the baby dressed in a pale pink romper and wrapped in a thin blanket. 

“There’s a first time for everything,” Clarice tells him, and she settles the girl against his chest until Francesco has no choice but to hold her. He rests her tiny head, all covered in short and ruffled hair, in the hollow of his arm.

“See? You’re a natural! It took Lorenzo two weeks to learn how to hold Piero properly but you’ve figured it out immediately.”

Lorenzo laughs, and maybe it is just a feeling but Francesco thinks Lorenzo’s gaze becomes just a little bit mellower, a little bit softer, as he watches Francesco holding his daughter in his arms. 

“She seems happy to be with you. What do you say, do you like being with uncle Francesco?”

Lorenzo waggles his fingers in front of Contessina’s face and he bops her nose lightly. The baby lets out an enthusiastic cry and lavishes her father in smiles. She wiggles in Francesco’s embrace in an attempt to grab Lorenzo’s fingers and Francesco experiences a moment of sheer terror when he fears the baby will slip from his grasp. Eventually, he manages to keep her steady against his chest and Lorenzo doesn’t even notice his second of dread. Perhaps only Clarice picks up on it, because Francesco catches her extending her hands, ready to help him, but at the same time she smiles proudly at him as if he were a child himself and she the mum who takes pride in him having learned something new.

Because Clarice trusts him. She trusts him enough to allow him to hold Contessina, and now Francesco would gladly vanish and bury himself in a grave as deep as the ocean. He feels dirty and cruel, because Clarice has no idea of what Francesco has done, of the many moments he has already spent fucking her husband and being fucked by him underneath ravaged sheets.

Lorenzo bites his lips, unaware of the guilt gurgling at the bottom of Francesco’s stomach, and he looks worriedly towards the stairs.

“I’d better go check on Giuliano.”

“Weren’t you supposed to let him suffer?” Clarice scolds him, condescending and yet sympathetic at the same time.

The risk they have all ran of not seeing Giuliano walking barefoot on the rugs anymore, of not having to put up with his uproarious tomfoolery, is still a too-fresh wound, barely healed, really. Clarice knows Lorenzo will always carry its marks.

Lorenzo opens his mouth to reply but she precedes him, “Go, but remember to take it easy. You know this is a bad moment for him.”

Lorenzo nods gravely. He gifts Francesco with a grateful smile and kind words for taking good care of Giuliano last night.

He bids him goodbye with an innocent and discreet kiss on his cheek.

It’s a quick touch of his lips, barely there, something which would be impossible to read as more than a simple goodbye between two friends who aren’t afraid of showing each other affection, but it is enough to burn on Francesco’s face as if he were now carrying the mark of Judas on his skin, had Jesus ever reciprocated that traitorous kiss among the olive trees.

The tender warmth of little Contessina in his arms only stresses Francesco’s burden of guilt now that he is alone with Clarice – Lorenzo’s lover and Lorenzo’s wife, who could even like each other as long as things stay as they are: dormant and concealed.

“You already know what I was talking about, don’t you?” Clarice asks him with a worried frown creasing her forehead. “It was March when the doctors told him there was no more hope for Simonetta. Even though she died in April, _that_ was the worst moment, when he was told there was nothing else to do. Since that instance, I wondered who had more strength between them two, if she had for surviving for so long or Giuliano for bearing to watch her dying in front of him. He was with her even on the day she passed away.”

Francesco nods. “I know. He told me.”

With his tongue loosened from smoking weed and weariness weighing down his soul and his bones, but he did, and Francesco caught in Giuliano’s eyes the same tired dread Jacopo had on one day when Francesco had stumbled upon him clutching an old scarf which had once belonged to aunt Maddalena.

Francesco has tried to wipe away that dread from Giuliano’s eyelids with his mouth and his fingers but he knows it will take more than that to dull the emptiness.

Clarice sighs dejectedly and she caresses her daughter’s head with light fingers. To find a hint of tenderness, to touch something beautiful in her life.

“Deep down, Giuliano is a good man, but he spends too much time pretending to be fine and too little trying to actually recover. He believes no one cares about how he’s really doing.”

“But that isn’t true.”

“No, of course it’s not, but it seems like keeping important things secret is this family's worst habit. Do you remember when last year he relapsed, around this same time? It had nothing to do with your accident.”

Francesco freezes, and a nagging suspicion gnaws at his throat. “Are you telling me that during the week he went away-”

“He was in a psychiatric facility, yes, not a physiotherapy centre. Sandro and I had to drag him there but he left soon after.”

The shriek of all the conflicting emotions Francesco is feeling must be written all over his face, because Clarice places a gentle hand on his arm and tries to comfort him.

“Don’t let this get to you. Giuliano was born backwards: the more he cares about people, the less he opens up to them. He kept it a secret even from Lorenzo and Bianca.”

“I thought he was getting better.”

“He is making progress. _He is_. He has finally agreed to go into therapy at the beginning of the year, and this is already a little miracle of its own. When Lorenzo suggested it before, Giuliano always refused.”

“Perhaps he was afraid you’d consider him weak.”

“Yes, I suspect that too. But things have changed now. Bianca and Lorenzo believe it’s because of you, and I agree with them.”

Francesco doesn’t know what to say. He is almost grateful to that God with whom he is finally starting to reconcile when Contessina lets out a sudden, high-pitched sound of displeasure and she reaches for her mum with her tiny hands, drawing his and Clarice’s attention with a certain arrogance. She squirms until it is clear that Francesco’s arms aren’t a welcomed cradle anymore. 

Clarice takes the baby back with such ease that it makes Francesco feel useless and clumsy in his inexperience.

“Oh, don’t worry. She’s tired and she always makes a fuss if I’m not the one putting her to sleep.”

Clarice rocks the baby as if she were just a little heavier than a feather, and she starts humming a casual, soothing lullaby which resembles a cradlesong Francesco might have already heard before, although he can’t recall where or from whom. It’s just something motherly and familiar which suits terribly well the intimate smile Clarice offers him.

“I have a secret too, you know. I cut a deal with the priest for our daughter’s christening: he’ll tell Lorenzo that the name Contessina isn’t Christian enough and he will baptize her only as Maddalena.”

Francesco raises his eyebrows sceptically.

“Lorenzo will make a donation to the church to make him change his mind.”

Clarice chuckles. “I’ve already made one myself to prevent him from accepting it.”

“You’ve bought the priest off before he could?”

Clarice shrugs and carries on rocking Contessina in her arms. “He can’t always have it his way. I didn’t complain when he wanted to name our son Piero, so he could’ve been reasonable and let me have Maddalena.”

Francesco bats his eyes and laughs. It even makes sense in its own way, but he can’t help but look at this woman who is so far away from everything he knows, so different from what Francesco has always experienced and wished for, and he wonders how it is possible that deep down they are so similar that they have both given up a part of their soul to the same man.

Up until now, it’s a similarity which Francesco has only ever shared with Giuliano. Recognising the pieces that matched has always been almost too easy between the two of them, what with their curses and their distrust and their impelling drive to scorch the ground around them to prevent anyone from getting too close.

“Is Piero with Lucrezia?”

Clarice makes a noise of dissent with her lips closed. “No, apparently not even Grandma Luce can keep him quiet today. As soon as he saw me coming back with Maddalena, he dashed to his bedroom,” she explains with her cheeks reddened by embarrassment. “He’s not at all pleased with the arrival of his little sister.”

“It’s normal. At first, Guglielmo couldn’t stand me either. We kept on kicking and biting each other till I was six.”

“What changed then?”

Their mother had died, and he and Guglielmo were too scared and alone to have the time to fight each other. Then dad had died too, and by then what else were they supposed to do?

“We realised an ally was better than an enemy.”

“Would you consider trying to make Piero understand that too? If you could only manage to make him stop crying anytime he sees his sister, Lorenzo and I will be forever in your debt.”

“Don’t get your hopes up. I’m not good with children.”

Clarice pouts. She can’t guess how much she resembles the baby asleep in her arms as she stares back at him, begging, “Please. Just one attempt? He doesn’t listen to any reason from any of us because he thinks we’re all on the baby’s side. It might be different with you.”

And perhaps Novella was right years ago, when she used to tell Francesco that he is not an asshole but rather the whore of anyone whose family name is _Medici_. She keeps telling him so sometimes and for the most part Francesco actually believes her – Novella has always known him better than he has ever known himself, she has always had the answers before Francesco could even realise there were questions.

However, right now Clarice’s pretty pout is only making him feel like a real piece of shit, and Francesco would do anything to quell at least some of his guilt, to deserve the glimpse of a family he is being offered.

“Alright.”

⁂

Giuliano’s bedroom is plunged into darkness, the shutters closed and the curtains drawn. Lorenzo shuts the door behind him, which supplies only one squeak of complaint when the latch clicks.

Despite the darkness, he has no trouble reaching his brother’s bed and sitting down on the edge of the mattress. Even though they stopped sharing the same bedroom when they were seven and nine, Lorenzo had always known his way around Giuliano’s spaces, as if they were his. Because, in a way, they are. There are no clear lines drawn between their lives, only borders as ephemeral as tendrils of fog.

Giuliano grunts a sleepy complaint and Lorenzo feels his way towards him in the thick shadows, until his eyes get used to the lack of light. He finds his brother’s soft hair beneath his fingers and leading from there he holds his face. Lorenzo rests his hand on Giuliano’s temple and forehead only, knowing even in the dark where to go to avoid his bruises, remembering perfectly where the fists have painted the canvas of Giuliano’s cheekbone.

It is nothing but an exercise in habit and recollection, this stretching and finding each other without being able to see. He and Giuliano have almost always touched each other like this inside this house: in the dark, behind locked doors even when they were the only ones in the whole villa. Just in case. Because fear and caution are far heavier than spontaneity within these aged walls of yore. 

“How do you feel?”

“As if I tussled with three drunkards.”

They speak in quiet whispers. This is another habit too, the customary circumspection for any thing and any soul that sleeps with one eye open and always seems to be about to catch them red-handed, to watch them and then shout through the key-hole that _Giuliano and Lorenzo love each other, they love each other more than brothers, they love each other as if they weren’t brothers_.

This house has come to know too much. It has been a witness to too many truths. It is ancient and huge and it cannot contain everything anymore.

Lorenzo touches Giuliano lightly with a cautious caress on the chest, he feels the warm and naked skin beneath the palm of his hand. Giuliano must have stripped off the pullover before he got into the bed – Lorenzo has noticed immediately that it didn’t come from Giuliano’s wardrobe. There was no jealousy when he recognised the garment, but rather a strange knot of nostalgia and bitterness tightening around his heart, because Lorenzo wishes he could also wear Francesco’s clothes so freely, that he could put on bits of the people he loves and smell their familiar scent on his own skin. But he can’t. Because there is Clarice, because they have children, and the only thing he fears more than losing his brother is losing his children.

Lorenzo would kill for all of them – for Giuliano, for Francesco, Clarice – but he lives for his children. 

He leans his forehead against Giuliano’s. He sighs on his lips, steals flakes of warm air from him. Words are like droplets of weariness trickling from one’s lips to the other’s until Lorenzo isn’t able to figure out who is the most exhausted between the two of them. He only knows that when he closes his eyes, he sees Giuliano asleep on a hospital bed again, and once more he is gripped by the fear of Giuliano never waking up.

“When will you ever learn, Giuliano? You mustn’t fight for me, you know I can defend myself on my own.”

“Yes, you can. But there’s no need for you to do it as long as I’m here.”

“And who will defend you, if you don’t let me help you?”

“Francesco is here.”

Yes, it’s true. Francesco is here. Francesco is here now as he has been once already, but he wasn’t here before and just like he had left once, he could leave again. His brother must stay, though, because Lorenzo can’t even breathe without him.

Perhaps he should forsake Clarice to preserve this balance a little bit longer, but Lorenzo doesn’t want to turn anyone away. He can’t. His heart has been swarmed by all these people to whom he can’t deny anything, not his time nor least of all his love.

“What would have happened if he hadn’t been there?”

Francesco makes things more bearable, he makes their days more vivid and colourful, but Lorenzo is afraid of wondering how long their happy aside will last this time. 

Today Giuliano seems to believe in it, though. To actually believe in it, unlike their first time when they were young men blemished with blurry blame and ideas and it all felt just like half-closed dreams, made of feelings that were left to be forgotten on their pillows in the morning.

Years afterwards, Giuliano had compared their unexplained and inexplicable relationship to a castle of glass, and like glass it had shattered.

But this time Giuliano believes in it. This time, he is trusting. This time, he fell asleep on Francesco’s bed instead of trudging to their doorstep hoping no one would see him.

“It would have taken me longer to knock down those blokes.”

“It can’t go on like this, Giuliano. I don’t know what else to do to make you understand that it’s paramount that you’re alright.”

And Lorenzo should expect the words which follow. He should already know them as if they were his own thoughts because Giuliano’s replies have always been arrogant and straightforward, they have never allowed him to hide behind a flower sewn in rhetorics and morals.

“Touch me. If that’s such a paramount thing for you, then touch me. Make me feel alright.”

Lorenzo’s problem – one of the many – is that he has never been able to say no to his brother.

He kisses Giuliano with no questions asked while a disheartened sigh is still slipping from his mouth. He kisses him with light lips because he is afraid of hurting him where he is still swollen and bruised. Conversely, Giuliano buries his fingers into Lorenzo's hair and draws him closer. He pulls Lorenzo to his mouth, bites him on the lips. Giuliano barely yelps when he pushes too hard, and Lorenzo tastes the tang of blood as the wound rips open again. Even then, Giuliano won’t loosen his grip, won’t let Lorenzo go.

Francesco should be here with them too. Not on the bed, not touching himself nor touching them, because in this instance Lorenzo has to prove to Giuliano that he will always be there for him, that he will go to any length to make him feel alive and wanted and desired, but Francesco should be here with them anyway. To watch them, to listen to them. To hear what they can’t speak out loud.

It is a complex balance, the one between the three of them, a game of mirrors where the glass panes are sometimes also windows, and there is dust, and the ravages of time and abuse are all scattered like drops along the edges.

With one hand, Lorenzo delves beneath the blankets. He meets no resistance, no obstacle standing between him and Giuliano’s body. He recognises the warm and familiar feeling of his brother’s skin, of the muscles shivering at the brush of his touch. Each time it’s like discovering a piece of himself under his fingers, a piece which had slipped away and now it’s been found again, it’s gone back to its rightful place in the world, in the universe that is made up of bodies of flesh and celestial matter.

Giuliano moans in his mouth when Lorenzo touches him between his legs, when his hand runs through the sparse hairs of his groin and finds heat and soft skin, Giuliano’s body burning and tautening.

“Behave,” Lorenzo shushes him in a whisper. “Quiet. We must keep quiet.”

Giuliano sighs an assent that is little more than a murmur, a slow shudder of his tongue, before reclaiming Lorenzo’s lips to do as he was told, to take pleasure with his eyes shut and his throat silent, each gasp stifled inside Lorenzo’s mouth and between his teeth as if it had never existed.

His neck still smells like Francesco’s embrace. He tastes like strong and sweet coffee on the side of his tongue, which collides with the trace of cigarettes that neither he nor Lorenzo smoke.

When Giuliano comes on Lorenzo’s hand, he is hot and trembling and his hips still seek out one last touch in a perfunctory twitch, begging for a small grace which Lorenzo bestows on him only when Giuliano behaves well, if he manages to obey him from start to finish. 

Lorenzo indulges him. He squeezes him lightly with attentive, skilled fingers once more, until Giuliano swears and slumps on the bed, entirely spent.

Lorenzo would like to bring his fingers to his mouth and savour Giuliano’s taste on his tongue, but he will do it later, in secret, when his brother will have caught his breath and fallen asleep again.

Giuliano’s hand brushes his wrist. There is a lightness in his rough fingers that tastes of satisfaction and dimmer melancholies.

“Some days, I miss you,” he whispers.

“I am always here.”

“Mh. Now you are, sure. But you won’t ever be here in earnest, will you?”

“I might. I might, if you allowed me to try.”

⁂

Piero sits on the rug in the middle of his room, surrounded by his toys. His curly head is bowed downwards, his eyes focused on the two toy cars he is holding and shoving against a dinosaur plushy.

Francesco clears his throat and leans a hand against the wooden door.

“Hello.”

Piero lifts his eyes and looks at him completely unafraid, just a bit puzzled, and this is already a new experience for Francesco: on his first attempts to come closer to Giovanna, she always got scared and ran behind Guglielmo’s legs – “ _It’s because she doesn’t see you often, she still has to learn you._ ” – until Francesco gave up on approaching her entirely. Perhaps one day his niece will find him less fearsome, but until then, Francesco prefers to avoid imposing himself.

“Who are you?”

“I’m Francesco, uncle Guglielmo’s brother. Do you remember me?”

“No.” Piero cocks his head and furrows his brow. “Are you the uncle with the big bike?”

“Yes, I’m the one with the big bike. The black one. Can I come in for a moment?”

“No!”

Francesco freezes, stumped.

“Alright, okay. But can I stay here by the door?”

Piero hesitates for a second. He frowns but he nods yes anyway.

It is an almost tragicomic recurring event: Francesco and his whole life spent at the doorway, watching the Medici family from afar.

“Have you come to see my baby sister too?” Piero asks him with his cheeks puffed in annoyance.

“No, I just came by to bring your uncle Giuliano back home. I saw her, though.”

Piero grumbles all his disapproval and carries on playing with the two toy cars, forcing them to clash.

Francesco curses the moment he yielded before Clarice. He doesn’t know how to talk to children. He doesn’t even know how to look at them or what he should think about them beyond the fact that they are difficult to handle and impossible to understand.

“Your mother told me you’re not too happy with having become a big brother.”

“I didn’t want a sister!” Piero snaps indeed, and he slams one of the cars against the floor in anger. “And neither a brother,” he adds, just to make his feelings abysmally clear on the matter.

“I see. Your uncle Guglielmo wasn’t pleased with having me either. Maybe, now that there’s Contessina, you feel like your mother and your father have less time, but that doesn’t mean that-”

Piero shakes his head, and even from afar Francesco notices right away how the child’s eyes are getting watery. His gut tells him to run inside and reassure him, but he has promised him he wouldn’t come in so he stands by the door and waits.

Piero sniffles, trying not to burst into tears. “ _Why wasn’t I enough?_ ”

And Francesco feels his heart melt, and burn, and hurt.

This is yet another victim of Lorenzo’s curse, one even more innocent than the others: Lorenzo has infinite love to give to the entire world and everybody falls on their knees at his feet, always hoping they will be that one special person to captivate all of him. But Lorenzo is boundless, so much so that a single creature isn’t enough to contain him.

It is a kind of inadequacy Francesco understands, a fear he is familiar with, that he has learned how to fight first-hand.

“You _are_ enough, Piero. Of course you are enough.”

“Then why did they make the baby sister?”

“Because both your parents know how wonderful growing up with siblings is. They had her for you too, so you could all be even happier together.”

“I was happy before.”

“And you’ll still be, believe me. Don’t you see how it is between your father and uncle Giuliano and aunt Bianca? Now it’s too soon to see it because your sister’s too young, but when she has grown some more, you’ll be glad she’s here.”

Piero listens to him in silence. He weighs Francesco’s words. He doesn’t seem quite convinced but he has that thoughtful face which Francesco recognises as Lorenzo’s typical expression when he is considering an interesting idea, so he feels that he might have managed to say something right for once, to provide some help without shattering the crystals around him.

Piero pats his hand on the rug beside him and looks at him purposefully.

“Do you want me to sit there?”

“Yes.”

Francesco sighs in relief and sits next to Piero. He crosses his legs trying to not take up too much space, to not look like a huge ogre sent to invade a child’s safe shelter. Rationally, he is aware that Piero is used to the presence of adults, that he sees his father Lorenzo and his uncle Giuliano every day, but for years people have pointed out to Francesco how his face, his height, his broad shoulders give off an imposing and menacing look. He is more used to taking advantage of his appearance rather than aiming to conceal it, but for Piero’s sake he makes an attempt. 

“Grandma says that mums and dads make children because children make you happy.”

Piero tugs Francesco’s jacket by his sleeve and stares at him with big and curious eyes while he says that. He seems to be seeking confirmation from Francesco, as if he weren’t sure that his grandma always tells the truth. 

“Yes, that is often the case.”

“And when it isn’t?”

It is almost touching how Piero listens to him so attentively. There is something alienating and dangerous in the way it makes Francesco feel important, as if his words had really some merit for this child who already has people like Lorenzo and Clarice to teach him the world. 

“It’s the grown-ups’ fault, never the children’s. Some grown-ups are incapable of being happy, despite having children.”

“Do you have children?”

“No, I don’t.”

“You don’t have a mum to have them with?”

Francesco laughs at Piero’s watertight logic.

For a moment, he thinks about Novella, about how some of her clothes have been left behind in his wardrobe ever since the first time she returned to Italy. A little more than a year has passed and Francesco hasn’t given them back to her yet, nor has she made any move to take them. They have been sitting there, partly to take up space, partly to come in handy for those unplanned, extra nights Novella spends at his.

“No, I don’t have one.”

“But you’re happy?”

Francesco hesitates for a second. It is a simple question which is supposed to take an equally simple answer, but Francesco wants to make sure he offers Piero only sincere words, not half-truths which could be second-guessed one day.

“I’m trying to be. I’m learning.”

Piero peers at him. He extends his arm with a resolute expression and he grabs Francesco’s palm with both his hands. His small fingers almost disappear when between Francesco’s ones, larger and adult, covered in nicks and callosities.

“I’ll help you learn! I’ll teach you.”

### 5.3 You can land on your feet even falling from up high

Francesco’s phone rings while he is debating whether the carton of milk Giuliano forgot out of the fridge that morning is still genuine. Maybe not, considering it is also a week old.

“Hello?”

“Fra, hi. How are you?”

Francesco finds himself smiling when he recognises Novella’s voice.

“Hi. I’m fine, I think.”

Novella scoffs from the other end of the receiver, half exasperated, half amused. “You think?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“What happened?”

“Apparently, according to Giuliano’s friends, I’m his boyfriend.”

“Huh, big news indeed. And you needed them to spell it for you to get it?”

Francesco glances at the t-shirt Giuliano has left at his flat. The stains haven’t come off even after a second wash.

“Seems so. I’ve also seen Lorenzo’s children. He and Clarice let me hold their youngest.”

Novella chortles. “You? You holding a baby? Don’t they know you shouldn’t even be left in charge of a succulent?”

Francesco nods even though she can’t see him. He joins her incredulous laughter. “Indeed. It was weird.”

“I wish I had seen that.”

“Next time,” he promises her, because beating around the bush is pointless: Novella must be at the airport right now, if Francesco remembers the time of her flight correctly, but this will definitely not be the last plane she catches. It won’t be the last time she leaves to come back again.

And then, Contessina was so tiny and smelled of baby powder, and Piero’s smile was so sincere and pure. Francesco isn’t sure he will be able to stay away from those children for long, so he wants Novella to see them too. He wants to laugh along with her as Lorenzo and Clarice try to figure out their daughter’s frowns or decipher Piero’s squiggles.

After all, Novella has always said she likes children, at least as long as they’re other people’s children. She would love to play with Contessina and Piero now that Francesco isn’t afraid of having them close.

Novella grumbles an half assent. “Yes. Listen, about next time…”

Francesco immediately picks up on the weariness of her tone and gets on alert. “Is everything alright?”

“I don’t know. That graphic studio I told you about called me back. They told me they’d like to interview me but the chief implied it would be more of a formality than anything. The job is mine if I want it.”

“Mh. And do you want it?”

Novella doesn’t answer, not right away. When she does, it is with a tired and hesitant voice which rings alien on her. She sounds like a different person, like an older woman wrecked by events she never wanted to live through in the first place.

“I want to come home,” Novella whispers softly, but not softly enough for Francesco to miss it. “But I’m not even sure where my home is anymore.”

_With me. It’s here with me._

Francesco would love to tell her so. He is about to, and yet he forces himself to hold back. He swallows his words together with the instinct to ask her where she is and rush to her. He smothers the desire to impose himself on those tears which Novella is surely choking back. Tears that, if he knows her enough – and Francesco does. He knows Novella more than he knows himself, because the rule between them has always been this: I know you and you know me, but we wouldn’t be able to recognise ourselves on our own – she has been holding back for a long time, since the moment she realised that Scotland couldn’t appease her as the first time she traded it for Italy.

“Home is where you feel the safest.”

Novella sobs. She sniffles and lets out a nervous laughter, “It’s also what Granda told me this morning.”

“You should listen to him.”

“Yes, maybe.” Novella sighs. “I could stay at theirs, at my grandparents’, until I find a place here,” she reasons tentatively. Francesco lets her talk, he understands her need to vent without being interrupted. “They get more and more upset each time I leave again. Nanna was about to burst into tears when they drove me to the airport today.”

“They love you.”

“Yes. I miss them a little. Lately, I’ve even taken to listening to Tenco because of them.”

Francesco smiles. He remembers all those times when he had been to Novella’s during their high-school years, and he had found her grandparents either in the kitchen or kneeling in the garden, pruning the flowerbeds, always singing _Lontano Lontano_ or _Una brava ragazza_ , a dazzling smile amidst their web of wrinkles.

He ended up learning those songs too, if only by dint of listening to the vinyl playing on a loop as he and Novella washed the dishes after dinner or while they hid in her bedroom, unmindful of the promise to leave the door open – and Novella’s grandparents had never scolded them too harshly, except for the very earliest times when they weren’t sure yet of how serious the relationship between Novella and Francesco were. Anyway, those two old foxes had always known more than they let on. “ _These are our wedding pictures, from when we still lived in Venice. I was a really beautiful bride, wasn’t I? And you must know, you can’t see it because I had the dress specially tailored by a friend, but I was already four months pregnant. I still have the dress. My daughter didn’t want it but who knows what my niece will be up to._ ”

“Francesco?”

“You can stay here at mine if you want. Should you choose to come back.”

He makes the offer before he realises it. He makes it even though he knows Novella will turn it down.

As easy as falling back into their old patterns was, into their quiet chats and into large truths blurted into the midnight dark, the two of them haven’t yet figured out what role they are playing in each other’s lives this time. What has changed, what they want to change.

Part of Francesco hopes she will agree to it, that she will start leaving her makeup in a mess in the sink and stocking the fridge with oat milk and grapefruit juice.

Novella has always been an artist in padding the silences and gaps which filled Francesco, so good at it that at one point Francesco had forgotten that the answers couldn’t come only from her.

“Fra, I love you to pieces, but if Granda finds out I’m moving in with you instead of staying with them, he’s going to set fire to you, to me, and then to your motorbike too.”

“Is he still not over the fact that I cruised you around on the scooter?”

“As if. And then you and Giuliano went and got into that accident. Now he’d be capable of grounding me like a ten-year-old if he ever saw me leave on two wheels.”

He wonders if Novella has realised what she is saying, that she is making it sound as if she has already made up her mind on how to proceed, on which way to go. On where to go back. 

“So, what will it be? Are you taking the job?”

“I could. The money is good, even better than what I’m earning now. But I don’t know, I have to think about it. I still have so many things to sort out in Scotland that… nothing. Sorry, I must hang up, they’re boarding my flight.”

“Let me know when you land.”

Instinctively, Francesco knows Novella is smiling again because her voice gets softer, gentler on her consonants and mellower on her vowels. 

“Sure. Will you pick me up next time?”

“You can count on it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can listen to _Il Vecchio e Il Bambino_ by Francesco Guccini [here](https://www.antiwarsongs.org/canzone.php?id=125&lang=it#agg12244) (English translation available)
> 
> For the purpose of this story, historical!Lorenzo de' Medici and Clarice Orsini's daughters Maddalena and Contessina were combined into the same character. In this 'verse, she shares historical!Contessina de' Medici's birthday, January 16th. 
> 
> Piero's nickname for Lucrezia, _Luce_ , means "light" in Italian.
> 
> I'll bake you virtual cakes if you reblog the [promo on Tumblr](https://ueberdemnebelmeer.tumblr.com/post/190668157903)! :)


	6. In New York the stars are missing (in New York I am missing)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _In New York the stars are missing_   
>  _A million windows, which one is yours?_   
>  _In New York there are no stars_   
>  _So many people around you_   
>  _But in New York I am missing_   
>  _You turn off the lights but you can’t sleep anymore_   
>  _The moon and her stars are still up too_   
>    
>  **In which Novella is far from home and she has no idea Francesco will call her in six months.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title and excerpt in the summary from [_New York_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5vurBcsFvo) by Ermal Meta  
>   
> This chapter takes place in August 2017, roughly six months before Francesco and Giuliano’s accident.  
>   
> CHAPTER DETAILS  
>  **rating:** T  
>  **pairings:** Novella/Francesco, Giuliano/Lorenzo/Francesco

  


Gifset crossposted from [Tumblr](https://ueberdemnebelmeer.tumblr.com/post/190796534288)

* * *

The wind blows so hard on the balcony of her hotel room that Novella needs a few tries before she manages to light her cigarette. And yet, despite this whistling and keening gale – even the wind is disgruntled by this sleepless city, by how the Liberty’s torch pricks at its throat – the heat is so humid and cloying that it sticks to her skin, and the lace of her bra itches underneath her tank top.

This overwhelming, overbearing swelter reminds her of Venice, even though she has vowed to never think back on either the marmoreal and briny city where she was born or her foul smell of algae drying under the sun when the tide is low.

Novella chose to forget Venice and her narrow alleys forever on the night when she and Francesco walked hand in hand back to the house that her parents owned behind Rialto.

The apartment should have been empty and with the lights turned off, awaiting only the two of them. Her parents should have both been either quarrelling or watching the television at their other house in Giudecca. Her father had just had one of his associates fetch him some cigars from Cuba, so he should have been smoking in the garden of the inner courtyard while sitting with his legs crossed on the rocking chair. Instead, he was there in the apartment in Rialto, his tie still loosened around his neck and his hands up the skirt of his latest secretary.

The embarrassment, the searing humiliation of having been there with Francesco – because he had witnessed too whose kind of pig shares her name – is still fresh in Novella’s mind. That secretary was barely thirty, she was closer to Novella’s age than to her father’s. Novella had even talked to her in a friendly manner more than once, they had considered going together to an opening night at the Goldoni theatre the following month.

Eventually, Novella had given the tickets to two university mates – only because ripping them in half would have been a pointless offense to the show.

Meanwhile, that night she and Francesco had stayed out until dawn, firstly to drown their embarrassment in the beer at the _Biliardi,_ and then to have breakfast at the first bar they had found open, drinking hot coffee and pretending Novella’s phone hadn’t been ringing nonstop for hours.

At the train station, Francesco had told her to board with him. To come back to Florence, to go to Rome together. “ _There’s another storm coming here. Come away with me, at least for a while, until this mess dies down._ ”

Novella had been tempted to accept. After all, she had gone back to Venice with the idea of staying there just enough to get her degree and then go back to Florence and to Francesco.

She told him not to worry about her. That very afternoon, she had sent an email to apply for an internship abroad from which she had never come back.

The thing is, when the wind blows this much, you can’t enjoy your cigarette as you should. The wind smokes it in your stead, it steals away the nicotine from your nostrils before it can penetrate into your throat and lungs properly. It is a sort of a twisted joke, to withstand the heat and the humidity and then having the consolation of a cigarette in your breath snatched away.

Novella wants to shower. She wants a glass of sparkling white wine to cleanse her palate. She wants to fly back to Scotland where it’s colder and people are grumpy just for show. Here though, they are truly grumpy, but they all pretend to be amiable and polite, and they kiss asses to rip a lower price on their employment contracts, the bunch of pricks.

God, she hates New York so much. It is so chaotic and over-crowded it makes it impossible not to feel lonely. You walk the streets and you are just an invisible ant swarming amongst the horde.

Also, the lights. Jesus Christ, the lights. They are on all day long, all night long, they are so many they smother the stars.

Francesco would have been so disappointed if he had seen this city, he who can even recognise the stars, and when they were teenagers he used to point them out with the tip of his cigarette between his fingers.

_“That’s Sirius, and the other one down there is Altair.”_

_“Show me again where the North Star is.”_

_“Come on, you still haven’t learned how to find it?”_

No, she never had. Especially because, at the time, Novella used to get lost in his hoarse and softly whispering voice. She hardly paid any attention to what he was pointing out with his hand.

She liked the space. She still likes it, the idea of a blackness and an infinite where unknown entities shine. As a child, she had even dreamed of becoming an astronaut: one evening, she had stood on the sofa and she had announced it in a shrill voice, hand on her heart. That phase had lasted for a while, although now she can’t recall exactly how long. Definitely longer than her ballerina one.

However, Novella has never studied the constellations with the same devotion and nostalgia with which Francesco listed them and then explained to her how they were more or less visible with the alternation of the seasons. More than the stars, Novella liked watching Francesco admiring them and talking about them as if they were much more than a map hanging over their heads.

Honestly, right now Novella could do gladly without thinking about Francesco. She is already tired and out of sorts after the hours spent in the traffic and after Viv has abandoned her to guzzle down the entire hotel bar on her own to recover from the meeting with the Americans. She doesn’t need Francesco and all the images she hasn’t been able to forget yet.

However, distracting herself from his memory is obviously difficult as long as she is here in New York, since he had often reiterated how this city was a place he would have loved visiting. Francesco has always preferred modern cities, the ones built with tar rather than sculpted in marble. He liked that sense of new and unstoppable which humanity had invented together with trains and steam engines.

Once, they had jokingly decided, “ _We’ll go there on our honeymoon_.”

They had laughed. The concept of marriage made her only laugh when she was twenty. But it was there. It was there because the possibility of breaking up was just as laughable. Scratch that, it wasn’t laughable at all: it was a harrowing idea, something you laugh about by necessity, because considering it seriously would be too daunting, too painful.

Novella inhales a puff of smoke and admits with pursed lips that the prospect of marrying Xander is just as daunting, even though he has always been sweet to her and he is learning Italian just to make a good impression on Novella’s family – he has got this weird notion of having to speak Italian with them, even though her Granda is as Scottish as he is, so both Novella and her mother grew up in a bilingual environment. Xander has plenty of good intentions and does too much mental gymnastics. 

Marrying Alexander would mean engraving the definitive headstone for the tomb where she has buried Francesco and their relationship, the Sunday mornings spent smoking astride the balustrades and those nights when they came capping each other’s mouths shut so his uncle wouldn’t hear them beyond the door. 

The problem is that Novella was lazy back then: she didn’t dig a deep enough grave. It only takes a gust of the wind to catch sight again of their last fight and Francesco’s fist against the wall, which had made her say _enough_. She can see glimpses of the phone call she had made while drunk and to which, thank God, Francesco hadn’t answered. And then, barely two inches beneath that, there are all the afternoons when Francesco used to smile shyly before taking her hand as they strolled down the streets, the evenings when they sat on the steps of the Loggia waiting for Lorenzo and Giuliano. 

It had never bothered her that Francesco was also in love with them. She might have even preferred it, because what Novella felt for Francesco was too vast for her alone and it scared her. She was terrified of losing herself, of drowning in Francesco’s embrace and forgetting herself like it had already happened to her mother with her father. She was glad to share him with someone else, that there were others besides her determined to protect him from his uncle and from himself.

When Francesco was with Lorenzo and Giuliano, Novella could take her time to exist as herself and only for herself, to refine the edges which had cracked in-between the different houses and the phone calls from her parents accusing her of not caring enough about them, while in the meantime they were giving her too little to earn her love.

And even with Lorenzo and Giuliano in their way, Francesco didn’t cast her aside. Not even during the trip they had arranged after Giuliano’s graduation, just before everything went South.

Novella was sure that she would hear him once, maybe twice altogether, that he would be too caught up in the novelty and in the pervading flavour of not needing to hide. Instead, Francesco had texted or called her every day – _“Why would a Saint have geese as her symbol?” “Giuliano tried to buy some butter, but he forgot to check its translation. Well, you speak Spanish, so you can imagine how that went down.”_ _“We’re at the Mercat Raval._ _If I buy you something, can you promise me you won’t get scared?”_ – and those texts were exactly what she needed to face her days at home with her parents, to remind herself that there were many things, even trifles, worth smiling for. Francesco knew that, so he kept on texting her and calling her mid-morning although Novella had never asked him to.

She wasn’t scared when he had come back from Barcelona with a ring for her. Francesco hadn’t actually bought it as a ring per se, but only because he had guessed she would like it, because she likes flowers, because green is her favourite colour. And indeed, he hadn’t even tried to put it on her ring finger. “ _You can wear it on your middle finger. With the amount of people you flip off every day, you’ll see it more often like this._ ”

Even when the four of them went together around Florence, Francesco didn’t forget her.

Yes, it’s true, he would joke with Lorenzo a lot, he would go on about fluctuations on the stock market with him for half an hour at least, while a bored Giuliano reached out for him in a caress which Novella couldn’t miss – and Giuliano did it on purpose. He wanted to show her that, like a dog with a bone, he wouldn’t let go of anything once it was in his jaws – but then Francesco would turn to her abashedly and apologise for dwelling on topics which made her yawn.

Novella had no choice but to smile and ruffle his curls. She found it endearing how he didn’t realise that, sure, he had spoken with Lorenzo or made fun of Giuliano, but always holding Novella’s hand or with his back leaning against her breast. Because Francesco sought all of them constantly. He loved the three of them unconditionally and relentlessly, even though he didn’t know it yet, even though admitting it terrified him.

Novella used to believe that, between all three of them, they would have managed to keep him afloat, to teach him also that home is where you feel safe and not where you grew up, surely not where you need to make deals with the staff so they won’t tell your uncle with whom you and your brother go out. With whom you’re in love.

What a fool. She should have known that good things are like butterflies, destined to die after a day.

Novella toys with the ring on her finger. It is a pretty ring, darkened like all the silver which never gets polished because you never slip it off, not even once a year, with four roses wrought into the metal and a small green stone which has nothing of Francesco’s eyes and yet it reminds her of them regardless. 

She has tried to take it off, but without it to distract her she doesn’t know what to do with her hands when she is nervous.

Novella realises how bad her funk is when she doesn’t just miss the _pane sciocco_ at her grandparents’ house or the sunny hours spent in Francesco’s embrace while listening to the same iPod, but she even misses Giuliano. She misses the moments they used to spend chatting after volleyball practice while they both waited for Bianca to leave the gym’s locker room. Giuliano used to drop by and pick up his sister after training because their mother wasn’t keen on Bianca running around on her own – maybe because she was a girl and also petite for her age, or maybe because Lucrezia knew her daughter well and she knew that Bianca would always act on her own initiative rather than do her parent’s bidding if left unsupervised.

For one reason or another, Novella had often found herself talking to Giuliano, making friends with him because Bianca had given him a shiner with a ball blow and Novella – who on that very day had skinned her arms to block one of the brutal smashes Bianca had hurled from down the court – had told him that he had probably deserved it.

Giuliano had been odd and cheeky already at fourteen. At fifteen, aided by the familiarity they shared by then, he had become even more so.

_“Listen, does Francesco like cock?”_

_“Excuse me?”_

_“Francesco, your boyfriend. I think he likes cock.”_

_“I don’t know. Could be. But if it were so, he’d never admit it.”_

_“Why, is he the repressed gay who acts like the homophobe?”_

_“Do you seriously think we could be together if he were a homophobe? No, it’s his uncle’s fault. Francesco is terrified of displeasing him, and that bastard would never be okay with a nephew who isn’t straight. Anyway, we have sex all the time. By now, I would have noticed if he were gay.”_

_“We should test it.”_

_“Are you asking me if you can have at it with my boyfriend?”_

_“Can I?”_

_“Not a chance! I’ll break your legs if you hurt him.”_

_“What if I promise I don’t? Hurt him, I mean.”_

And at that point, Novella had really started to mull over it because she had caught the sincerity in Giuliano’s eyes. On that day, he hadn’t asked for her permission to make a move on Francesco: he asked for her permission to care for him, even though he had done it in that weird and labyrinthine way of his to avoid feeling like he had exposed himself too much.

Francesco had always been in great need of people who would care for him, who would love him for who he was rather than for he could be or could have been.

_“If you can manage to approach him. But think it through, because if I find out that he’s hurting because of you, you’re dead meat.”_

_“Isn’t the guy the one who’s supposed to threaten someone’s life because they shag his girlfriend?”_

_“I know where you live, Giuliano. Remember that I know where you live and that Bianca wouldn’t stop me.”_

Novella had no way of knowing that Giuliano was the lesser threat. She wasn’t familiar with Lorenzo yet, or at least not enough to predict what it would mean to allow Francesco to enter Giuliano’s orbit. She couldn’t foresee that there was no way of caring about one brother without also dealing with the other.

Novella had met Lorenzo only in passing through Lucrezia’s infatuated sighs as she recounted between classes how he had given her a poem wrapped around a rose for their anniversary. Original poetry written by his own hand, obviously, because Lorenzo cared about genuine things, he breathed romanticism more than he breathed air.

Foolishly, Novella had deemed him harmless.

After all, that’s how Lorenzo always leads everybody down the garden path, how he is probably still fooling everyone there in Florence, where people go seeking him, wanting him, adoring him. Lorenzo fools you honestly, with a cheerful and serene smile, with a hand on your shoulder to comfort you when you are feeling down and a sincere compliment when you are happy to make you feel even better.

People should always be wary of those as beautiful as Lorenzo. They are too perfect to live as all other mere mortals do. It is also for this reason that Novella prefers those broken inside like Giuliano and the ones who try to conceal all their goodness behind a mask like Francesco. 

But eventually, war veterans wound you as deep as who has glimpsed at battles only from afar. Francesco, with all his thorns piercing his chest, each one dripping with a different sorrow, torn her soul exactly as Lorenzo did with him, and the only difference being that whereas Francesco deemed himself the only one at fault, undeserving of Lorenzo’s astonishing perfection and incapable of providing Novella a love beautiful enough, she knows that for a time, for some precious instants, they had it all. They had their butterfly day.

But then they got lost. _Francesco_ got lost. Not even the stars were enough to show him the way home anymore, they all had to find new roofs.

Novella finishes her cigarette. There are still three more in her packet but she crumples it in her fist and tosses it away anyway, because they are the same cigarettes Francesco used to – might still – smoke.

She can’t truly stop thinking about him if any time she lights one, she recalls how smelling their tang on his hands felt like.

It is high time she stopped smoking. She has vowed to do it for years and who knows, this time might be the charm.

She has no clue what she will do once she is back in Scotland, what she will think about as she opens the windows to air out her flat in Rose Street. Whom she’ll think about.

Xander wants to marry her, but Novella doesn’t believe in marriage. And even if she did, marrying is still an eventuality she doesn’t fancy: the thought of the ceremony, of the dress bought to be worn only once, and of the people who come together and have to be happy for you, weighs her down. She would have done it just for the honeymoon trip, but she has been to New York already, and in the end it was for the best because this city sucks. It would have been an awful trip. It would have sucked even if she had come with Francesco.

You can’t see the stars with all the lights smothering the sky.

Perhaps she should have allowed herself one last cigarette before going to shower and trying to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The _Teatro Goldoni_ is one of the opera houses and theatres of Venice.  
>   
>  _Ai Biliardi_ is a bar that serves beer and it’s the only one that’s open all night in Venice (it seems to have been reported for public nuisance, though).  
>   
> Among the symbols associated with Saint Eulalia, co-patron saint of Barcelona (the other one being Saint Jordi), there are geese, and thirteen of them roam the cloister of the city’s cathedral in the saint’s honour.  
>   
> Butter is called _burro_ in Italian. In Spanish, _burro_ means “donkey” (while “butter” would be _mantequilla_ ).  
>   
> The _Mercat Raval_ is one of the oldest markets in Barcelona, where you can find antiques and hand-crafted products.  
>   
>  _Pane sciocco_ is a variety of bread; _sciocco_ means “without salt” (but it’s also a synonym for “stupid” in Italian). It’s common in the Italian regions of Tuscany, Umbria and the Marches, and it’s also called _pane toscano_ outside of Tuscany.  
>   
> I'll bake you virtual cakes if you reblog the [promo on Tumblr](https://ueberdemnebelmeer.tumblr.com/post/190796534288)! :)


End file.
